So it came to pass that the Government listened to the people and suspended a decision of immense national import, the privatisation of car parks, of all things.

It came to pass, thus, that the Opposition's motion to have the notion of privatisation knocked on the head became an irrelevance, a waste of time - if it had been a person, it would have been called a waste of skin.

And it came to pass, consequently, that the whining, self-absorbed twerp who was going to vote with the Opposition on the motion, found himself without a vehicle on which to parade his spite and verily, he stamped his little foot and shouted and screamed and became all red in the face.

The thing is, Dr Franco Debono has become an utter irrelevance, a boring inconvenience, if you will. He is someone who may yet bring down the Government a few months in advance of the time when the elections would have had to be called anyway, but this is merely a happenstance of electoral mechanics and no measure of the worth of the man.

So Debono will vote against the Budget, he says? How surprising: he's been ratcheting up the stakes month after month, being outplayed at every turn by the PM. Given that we're in the endgame anyway, the only response to Debono's latest little outburst is a polite yawn, accompanied by the gesture one uses to dismiss the inconsequential.

And whether his vote will result in his old classmate becoming PM or not is another matter, since when the campaign kicks in, all bets are off, but the real ray of shining light, giving us a silver lining of dazzling hues, will be that Debono will become a mere cipher, a citizen with one vote, like all the rest of us, jumping with the common masses, an Onorevoli no more.

He will be remembered, except by the sad few who populate his blog with spluttering comments that are even more incomprehensible than the blog itself, as a politician who lacked any iota of class or loyalty to the party under whose banner he was elected, one for whom personal aggrandisement and dancing in the spotlight of tawdry publicity, for whom spite and vengefulness, even for imagined wrongs, were more important than anything else.

He will also be remembered, perhaps fondly, by the cynical manipulators who egged him on, openly or not, in the interests of their own agenda and by the less responsible elements of the media, who gave him the oxygen of publicity that he clearly craved. They will all, in one way or another, look back over the months during which Debono was their mainstay and say to themselves "wow, he was a handy dupe to have around, now, who next?"

However you will remember him, if you remember him at all, at last, we will be rid of this irritating specimen.