Last night’s vote on Konrad Mizzi – the behaviour of every MP who, with their vote, declared confidence in Mizzi – needs to be judged against its background of shifting excuses made by Mizzi and Joseph Muscat. It’s not just that the excuses were never convincing. Practically each new excuse gave the lie to the one offered only days or weeks before.

Because of its deadline, this column was written before the vote, without knowing what you know now. If Mizzi was blackballed, let the column serve as an epitaph. If he survived, let it serve to show why the episode cannot be considered closed.

It’s been said that politicians have the power not just to create the future but also to rewrite the past. In one sense, the intense daily press scrutiny of Panamagate enabled Mizzi and Muscat to erase the past and rewrite it from week to week.

The press focus on each new damning detail and the chase for real answers to the fresh news enabled the duo to deflect attention from the answers that they had previously given.

Who now remembers one of the first reasons Mizzi gave to explain why he opened a Panama company? For a while, his emphasis was that he was really trying to avoid a conflict of interest. Using a Maltese firm and Maltese financial structures to help manage his assets, he suggested, was ethically dubious since his advisors might later bid for and win government contracts. It was ethical sensitivity, he almost said, that drove him to Panama.

Somehow, he stopped talking about that. And not a moment too soon. It turns out Mizzi’s financial advisors, Nexia BT, have a managing director who has not denied having an office in the same building as Mizzi. The firm has won several government contracts, some by direct orders. Bully for the firm but what about Mizzi’s definition of conflict of interest? Luckily for him, the press forgot about it.

Another early reason disappeared from view, although something Mizzi told the press only last Friday should make us go back to it.

Mizzi has justified his Panama company in terms of planning for his post-ministerial career. It’s still striking that he chose to open it at the beginning and not the end of his stint as minister. Why go in for the expense of opening and maintaining such a company before you really need to use it?

On Friday, it got more puzzling. He told the press that he had signed up for a 10-year project with Muscat. That’s right: 10 years.

So why did he acquire a company in 2015 (to accept his version of the timeline) in order to begin to use it earnestly eight years later in 2023?

Because, meanwhile, all that’s left to put into the Panama company, or so it seems from what he’s told us, is the rent from his London house, which from his own declarations amounts to no more than the monthly rent of a nice flat in Sliema.

Muscat’s shifts of reasons and attitudes have been just as striking.

When Panamagate first broke, Muscat was soothing. There was no problem whatsoever. He declared he had known for the previous three weeks. He matter-of-factly explained that Mizzi owned property abroad (implying this needed a non-Maltese financial structure).

The reassuring, soothing Prime Minister of late February and early March morphed into a hurt one in April. Why?

After a week of public anger, the explanation changed. What Mizzi had done was technically correct but politically naïve. Therefore, the company would be shut down and that should reassure everyone.

But if it seemed naïve to Muscat, he didn’t explain why it hadn’t seemed naïve the moment he is supposed to have learned about it – a full month before. Or why he hadn’t then asked for it to be shut down.

The public anger continued to rise and began to be directed at Muscat’s inaction. The attitude changed again. Now, the Prime Minister justified his inaction by saying there were ‘no facts’ established – hence why he was waiting. But in order to massage public feeling he also said that he, too, was concerned.

Just what he was concerned about he was not asked to explain. Was it the sheer possibility of corruption? Why then did he not act the moment Mizzi told him about the company? Did he need the public to point out that he needed to be concerned?

In any case, by last Thursday, concern had given way to ‘hurt’ inflicted by Mizzi’s behaviour (apparently not by Keith Schembri’s). The hurtful behaviour deserved a ‘rebuke’ – and so Mizzi was to resign the deputy leadership of the Labour Party, although he remains minister.

The reassuring, soothing Prime Minister of late February and early March morphed into a hurt one in April. Why? Muscat has always denied that each new revelation was damning. On the contrary, he’s always been keen to explain it away.

There’s more.

On the night of Mizzi’s election as deputy leader, Muscat addressed concerns about Mizzi’s behaviour by expressing full confidence in him. However, last week Muscat declared that Mizzi’s behaviour called for a ‘rebuke’ amounting to resignation of his deputy leadership.

What’s going on?

When Muscat pushed to change the party rules to enable Mizzi to contest the deputy leadership, he already knew about what Mizzi had done. If the behaviour deserves a rebuke, why not stop him from contesting in the first place? Why, when he’s elected, express full confidence in him?

Perhaps someone can ask Muscat to explain how it all adds up. Until he does, there is only one plausible explanation.

All along, he has been pursuing an anger management strategy. First, he ignored the public anger, hoping he could sit it out.

Next, when the anger was clearly coming to a boil within Labour’s parliamentary group, he shifted tack. He gave assurances that he would act but asked for time so as to act according to his timetable, not the Opposition’s (actually, the public’s).

He gave reassurances that he ‘got it’. He let it be leaked that his action was imminent, with broad suggestions that Mizzi would be given a face-saving exit.

With hindsight we can surmise that what Muscat was really playing for was the time to hold Sunday’s May Day meeting.

It’s not because he thinks the huge crowd will reverse the story told by the polls, that more people are angry than not and that Labour’s electoral chances are jeopardised with Mizzi remaining minister.

In one way, the meeting was even a forced error. That crowd couldn’t be mobilised without appealing to a Labour diehard identity and symbols. All the work from 2008 to rebrand Labour went up in smoke in one afternoon.

In another sense, however, Muscat actually needed the crowd to look like Labour diehards. The meeting’s primary audience was not the public. It was the increasingly restless parliamentary group.

Having seen that crowd, its size, its temper, its lionising of Mizzi, Labour MPs were invited, shall we say, to weigh their personal anger against the anger of such a crowd should the MPs’ personal vote on Mizzi not be the right one.

And there you have the background for yesterday’s vote. Labour MPs can see the inconsistencies as well as anyone. After yesterday we know who, among them, is free and who is unfree.

ranierfsadni@europe.com