You know the government is in trouble when even Robert Abela realises the resentment is not a conspiracy, sheds his yachting clothes, dons a long-sleeved business shirt, buttons up his collar in a heatwave, eschews the red necktie he wears when feeling confident with a Labour audience and, speaking on ONE radio, adopts the light-blue tie associated with Joseph Muscat, the way some people wear lucky underwear for job interviews.

It’s going to take more than that. The boiling anger at the power cuts, which saw the nation dedicate their warmest wishes to the government, will die down. The contempt will remain.

When even the circumspect Chamber of Commerce calls you out for holistic, systemic, 360-degree incompetence that is threatening to send the country over the edge, it means the government has lost all authority.

Two summers ago, Abela could boast to a Labour general conference that only Labour could renew the country. He challenged listeners to find a better minister on the opposition benches than he had in his cabinet. Today, such boasting would be met with a cringe or outright laughter.

There isn’t a minister who, today, isn’t considered ineffectual, a failure, on the take or some combination of all three. The exception is the health minister, whose closest aide, however, has claimed that he’s the victim of an attempted frame-up and strongly hinted it’s an inside job.

To look at the one minister whose reputation is unscathed is still to be reminded of one of the biggest heists under Labour, the hospitals giveaway, and the criminal conspiracies still afoot today.

The bitter laughter is sounding all over Facebook, TikTok and WhatsApp. The jokes write themselves.

It’s understandable that Abela finds himself at the centre of the mockery when he has been so keen, in better times, to puff himself up. It’s natural that Labour insiders are leaking against him when he has felt comfortable humiliating his ministers in private and throwing them under a bus in public.

But it’s also a misunderstanding, or spinning, of a situation gone sour. Abela lacks Muscat’s social intelligence and ability to appear empathetic. He is cocooned in wealth and self-entitlement. But he’s not stupid, as his critics, internal and external, suggest.

Some of his behaviour has been mistaken and, because it was avoidable, stupid. But the world is full of intelligent people behaving stupidly at home or at work.

The real question is whether the mistakes that the chamber called out – the strategic and tactical ones which endanger economy, security and quality of life – were avoidable if the Labour government was to survive.

I suspect that any successor to Muscat would have found them impossible to avoid, except with the tinkering on the margins that we’ve seen under Abela.

Abela likes to boast of his reforms. But, as any analyst of state reforms will tell you, not all systems of corrupt governance are the same.

Some regimes can be reformed while preserving the power of the ruling party or monarch. Others can be reformed but cost the man at the top his job while preserving his colleagues’ hold on power. And other systems can’t be reformed without bringing the entire regime down.

You can’t judge Abela without deciding which of those three scenarios is ours.

When Muscat, disgraced by events, was pushed out by his colleagues, the hope clearly was that it could preserve the system of governance in place. Let us remember that even Chris Fearne, some time before that, told an interviewer that Labour had found a pragmatic business model that worked.

If Muscatonomics worked, Muscat would deserve the Nobel prize not another term in government- Ranier Fsadni

When, today, Abela, ridiculed by events, is leaked against by his colleagues, the assumption is that a change of leadership could salvage power. And, of course, the stagnation of the Nationalist Party in the polls feeds the hope.

But the question is this: Over the past three years, in every decision concerning good governance, what could have been done differently by a different Labour prime minister and preserved power, instead of bringing it crashing down?

The contrast usually drawn with Muscat shows the difficulty. Muscat at the end was no saviour. He did almost bring everything crashing down. Only his departure saved the day.

Today, everyone can see more clearly – although some of us called it out then – that Muscatonomics was an economic con job even without the mega-corruption.

There’s a reason other countries don’t practise environmental deregulation, centralisation of informal decision-making, rapid labour importation and erasure of checks and balances. It gives a spurt of economic boom, followed by infrastructural bust.

If Muscatonomics worked, Muscat would deserve the Nobel prize, not another term in government. Ever wondered why he swanned around Europe giving speeches about Malta’s model but everyone refrained from adopting it?

It’s a recipe for a national, short-term, all-you-can-eat happy hour followed by economic and social obesity, clogged arteries and cirrhosis of the liver.

Then there was the cronyism – on the grand scale and every scale beneath – which tempted people to ignore the daylight larceny.

Ministers were given fiefdoms and overpaid jobs to give away. They were all in on it.

Had someone else, not Abela, succeeded, could he have brought that model to a halt without uniting his colleagues against him? Or sending the party machine into a panic because the core support was vanishing and the spectre of “Alfred Sant all over again” rose before everyone’s eyes?

In thinking about a successor to Abela, the most relevant questions aren’t what an alternative leader would do in the future. It’s what they would have done differently in the past three years.

If all they can suggest is fiddling on the margins, it’s a sure indicator that even they can’t think of a way significantly to reform Labour’s political business model, now exposed as so unsustainable for the country.

That would mean that Labour’s survival is at odds with the country’s. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to hide.