I don’t feel at all inclined to stick up for the second Mrs Pullicino Orlando, but…

There are quite a few people who really should be eating their words right now, including all those who said that Carmen Ciantar got what she wanted from Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando (using him as a tool to bring her preferred political party to power) and so has dumped him.

And those others who said that she could no longer stand his behaviour and so walked out. As though she needed to marry him to find out what he was like after living with him for a decade.

Neither of these explanations made sense when we heard of the marriage break-up and before we knew of his affair with one of her best friends, and the first explanation was terribly unfair.

Married women with a job and an income and even property (Carmen Pullicino Orlando has a house of her own, part of the settlement from her previous marriage), do not suddenly leave the marital home and move to their parents’ house, collecting their personal effects later, unless they have discovered something about their husband which they did not expect, which has shocked them to the core, and which has made them unable or unwilling (or both) to stay under the same roof long enough to organise more sensible and independent accommodation of their own.

Women who decide to end their marriage because they have had enough, or because they are tired of it all, plan this out, because the decision is a considered one and has been reached after much thought. All that thinking also involves planning where to live. There is time to prepare all that.

Those who leave suddenly and with nowhere to go except a hotel, a friend’s or their parents’ house, do so because they are shocked by something they have discovered about their husband, or by something very serious that he has done to them.

Also, deciding to dump him just a year after deciding to marry him, because she was tired of his behaviour or believed he had served his purpose, was never a credible explanation and it was very unfair, too. Carmen Ciantar and Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando had been living together for 11 or 12 years – she knew exactly what he is like, including his obsessive and fearsome rages, when she married him.

Indeed, she married him when he was at his worst, the summer before last, when he was in the news almost every day and on television speaking with the controlled, monotonous rhythm of the psychologically problematic, looking debauched and ‘exhausted’ with a swollen face, forever on our television screens.

When their marriage banns were already out – they are six weeks in Malta – instead of approaching his supposedly longed-for wedding day with serenity, Pullicino Orlando became increasingly enraged and hysterical as the big day approached.

When he put on his big, mad performance at the Nationalist Party in July last year, arriving with soldier Stephen Ciangura and another bodyguard, making scenes at the door and claiming he had momentous evidence for the party trial of the century (which turned out to be the fantasy of the seriously unbalanced), he was verging on the psychotic. He was four weeks away from his wedding day and the banns had been out for two weeks. Lots of people commented that this was not normal behaviour in a man four weeks away from a much publicised and much anticipated marriage. It was the behaviour of a man facing the gallows, who felt forced to choose between that death and death by public shame of pulling out of a marriage for which he had held Malta hostage.

Their honeymoon? A few days in Gozo in the worst of the Santa Maria period (they married on 11 August) in the company of others: Consuelo Herrera and Robert Musumeci, Jose Herrera and his wife. You would have expected, after all that drama, that they would have headed off to a remote island for a month of luxuriating privately in each other’s company far away from it all.

Yes, Carmen Ciantar manipulated the political/relationship situation to her own and the Labour Party’s advantage, but the price she has paid for that has far outweighed the rewards so far. She was in very dangerous company, had a particularly dangerous and meddling viper (Magistrate Herrera) right there in her nest, and she either did not know it or thought she could out-scheme them all.

Carmen Ciantar did not need to marry Pullicino Orlando to use him politically or otherwise, as she had been doing that perfectly well for around a decade already. She married him because she wanted to and because she thought she could make a go of it. Now we know that it was he who had quite different feelings on the matter and felt trapped into going through with the marriage because he was under the glare of the public spotlight as the promoter of the divorce bill.

Carmen Ciantar, ostensibly a member of the Evil Clique, has in reality been its bloodied victim. There is one member of that Evil Clique who practises a policy of divide et impera, meddling between couples she thinks form too strong a unit together by repeatedly bringing the weaker of the two into temptation’s way until he or she succumbs and the couple break up.

This leaves her able to control the two former component halves individually, or to dispense with the non-useful half and secure complete control of the useful half. Suffice it to know that this woman has been a friend of Mariella Mifsud, the temptation that was put in Pullicino Orlando’s way, for much longer than Carmen Ciantar has. They used to dine and lunch regularly a quatre – this woman and her boyfriend the architect, with Mariella Mifsud and her then consort, the married PN MP Stephen Spiteri.

Carmen Ciantar was stupid to trust any of them.