It is unclear whether Abela had read the chats at this points, but he could certainly have accessed them – either via Cutajar herself or more discreet channels – had he really wanted to.

It is pretty hard to believe that these messages had been circulating for years but managed to avoid the hands of the most powerful man in the country.

In October 2021, Mark Camilleri published A Rent Seeker’s Paradise, claiming that Cutajar had an intimate relationship with Fenech, “who gave her corrupt money on the pretence she had helped him broker a property deal”. Cutajar promptly sued Camilleri for libel, and Camilleri responded by publishing extracts from her chats with Fenech.

It was clear that Camilleri had access to these chats and wasn’t afraid to publish them at a time that was convenient for him, yet Abela didn’t react to what was clearly a ticking time bomb.

Not only did he keep Cutajar in his party but he allowed her to contest the 2022 general election, stating that “she had shouldered the political consequences and it is now up to the people to decide” whether she should return to Parliament.

He essentially outsourced his duty to make an ethical decision to the general public, similar to what Joseph Muscat had done with Konrad Mizzi in 2017.

And decide they did. Competing in the sixth district, Cutajar faced stiff PL competition from serving ministers Roderick Galdes and Silvio Schembri, as well as Ian Borg (albeit not on his strongest district) and popular doctor Malcolm Paul Agius Galea, and yet she won 2,158 first-count votes, some 200 more than she had received in 2017, and was re-elected to Parliament by casual election.

Yet Abela left Cutajar out of his Cabinet again, choosing newcomer Rebecca Buttigieg as his Parliamentary Secretary for Equality, even though she had received way fewer votes than Cutajar.

Why would he do that? Cutajar had done a good job as Parliamentary Secretary, particularly on a cannabis legalisation bill, and was removed because of the Fenech chats, not her performance.

But according to his own comments, the people had spoken and said they didn’t care about the Fenech chats, so why did the Prime Minister exclude her? As for Cutajar herself, one wouldn’t be surprised if she’d been left feeling confused at all these mixed messages, if not a sense of betrayal that Abela had used her to gain votes when he never had the slightest intention of deploying her in his government in the first place.

When Camilleri finally published the chats, a year after the general election, Abela’s immediate reaction was to defend her and accuse Camilleri of misogyny.

However, a few days later his tone changed yet again. He now forced Cutajar to resign as a PL MP and, although he didn’t tell her what exactly had changed since 2021, he told the press that people were annoyed at a “particular comment” which emerged in the chats. That was of course a reference to Cutajar’s infamous “kullħadd qed jitħanżer” comment, an egregious example of how people close to the PL elite view the public purse as a free money tree.

Yet if Abela viewed that as such a shocking comment, it begs the question as to where he has been the past few years, when this kind of “piggery” has become so normal that minister Silvio Schembri didn’t even think twice before boasting in Parliament that members of his ministerial secretariat have been deployed to his personal constituency office.

This doesn’t sound like Abela raising the standards in public life. It sounds like Abela being corralled into making a U-turn by people within the PL who are either concerned that the party’s cavalier attitude might be harming it in the polls or who didn’t like Cutajar much to begin with and saw this as a perfect opportunity to get rid of her.

The end result of these twists and turns is the worst possible outcome for Abela. He has hurt Cutajar on a personal level and, by keeping her seat, she has drained the PL’s parliamentary talent pool and deprived Abela of the chance to co-opt someone in her stead.

He has also sent a subliminal message to Cutajar’s colleagues that he can easily be swayed, and he hasn’t even pleased Cutajar’s critics, who will still have to see her in Parliament for the next four years. Short of Cutajar going rogue and MPs engaging in open warfare, it’s hard to see how this could have culminated worse for Abela.

What do you make of Abela’s decision?