One of Shakespeare’s most dramatic moments is that of Lady Macbeth sleepwalking while trying to remove the imaginary bloodstains of the king she has helped murder. Despite her furious rubbing, the stains will not go away.

Our government finds itself in exactly the same position. Its efforts to remove the stains of the treacherous acts it committed over the past years simply will not go away.

Robert Abela is trying to portray himself as a purveyor of change but his changes are nowhere near what the doctor ordered for our ailing democracy.

Lawrence Cutajar resigned in what many considered to be a step in the right direction. Until they found out that he was given a consultancy job with the Home Affairs Ministry. And, until we realised that Abela wants to effectively retain the right to appoint and dismiss the new commissioner of police, which effectively means that the police force will remain under the political influence of the government of the day.

Konrad Mizzi was left out of Cabinet. Great, some said. Until they found out that he was nominated as head of the Maltese delegation to the OSCE and that he was also given a plum consultancy job with the Malta Tourism Authority barely two weeks after he resigned in disgrace as tourism minister.

Abela back-paddled on the OSCE appointment when faced with stiff opposition. The government also moved to cancel the consultancy agreement although to date no sanctions were taken against those who approved this outrageous and possible illegal contract. The Opposition, rightly so, brought this matter to the attention of the Public Accounts Committee. We hope that the deliberations will shed light on this highly suspicious deal, from which Mizzi stood to gain a quarter of a million euros in three years.

Is it enough that the contract was cancelled? Of course not. Are there other contracts we should know about that were similarly hidden from the public eye? Probably.

The very heart of government needs a change that goes beyond the outer thick skin

Was Abela aware of this and, possibly, other contracts? It seems, after all, that there was more than one diabolic pact.

The pending court cases and investigations were always going to be a test for Abela.

I, for one, am not impressed by his reaction to the Constitutional Court’s decision which found Minister Owen Bonnici guilty of breaching fundamental human rights.

When asked whether he is going to sack Bonnici, Abela said no.

When asked for his reaction to the judgment, which among other things found government guilty of fomenting hate at a national level, Abela said that he pre-empted the court’s decision by giving instructions to stop the clearing of the memorial for Daphne Caruana Galizia.

That is like a thief saying that he stopped stealing because he pre-empted a guilty sentence. At the very least, I would have expected the government to apologise to all the people who felt aggrieved by the government’s actions. I would have expected someone to shoulder political responsibility.

But in one last act of defiance, the government is going to sweep this judgment under the carpet as if it never happened.

Abela’s first month in office was never going to be easy. He is caught between a rock and a hard place. He needs to simultaneously appease those who rightly so want a visible and concrete departure from the corrupt practices that became the order of the day under his predecessor while, at the same time, not rocking the Labour boat too much.

He needs to rebuild Malta’s reputation but to do so he will have to destroy the reputation of people who still hold sway within the Labour Party.

He is finding out that doing things covertly is not an option, not least because there are those within his ranks who are not quite happy with the new boss and will willingly leak information. The Labour ranks are no longer united as they were until not so many weeks ago. With all his failings, Joseph Muscat was a unifying factor, probably because of his air of invincibility.

That air is long gone and with it the willingness of certain people within the Labour Party, including members of Parliament, to toe the party line no matter what.

Abela has expressed no qualms in trying to buy the silence of his backbench the same way that Muscat did. Even if this runs counter to the recommendations of local and foreign institutions that are saying the independence of Parliament is crucial in a functioning democracy. But it seems that Abela is not too concerned that Malta was relegated to a flawed democracy by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

The coming months are critical for Malta.

If we fail to do certain reforms, our country will be blacklisted. From what we have seen so far, Abela and his new Cabinet have failed to understand the most important thing about change: change starts from within. The very heart of government needs a change in mentality, a change in attitude, a change that goes beyond the outer thick skin. Putting on make-up to hide flaws is simply not going to cut it.

Mario de Marco is a former minister and a Nationalist MP.