EGYPT'S ousted President Muhammad Mursi cuts a sad figure these days. His trial on charges of inciting murder and violence has been adjourned until the start of January. However, his court appearances have been indicative of the mindset that led to his overthrow and indeed of the errors that he amassed, which made his ouster inevitable.

To the end, he chooses to stare reality in the face by declaring to the court that he is still the elected president of Egypt. He, therefore, does not recognize the legitimacy of the court nor of the charges against him. On this basis, he has refused to name any lawyers to defend him.

It is likely that history will judge Mursi not as a cunning and manipulative leader, totally intent on subverting the democratic process that brought him to power, but rather as a naïve ruler.

Mursi failed to understand the key issues that faced him from the moment that he was elected president in June 2012 with 51.7 percent of the vote in a run-off election against Ahmed Shafiq, Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister. His first challenge was to understand the real nature of the political process that had brought him to power.

He needed to take into account, not simply the views of those who had given him a narrow victory, but also the opinions of those who had not voted for him. Egypt was emerging from 60 years of military domination, in which the state had been rebuilt. Mursi was highly sensitive to the possibility that the military would find some excuse to oust him. However, in his overarching concern to defend himself the so-called “deep state” of military influence, Mursi entirely neglected the one powerful lever that he had been given by the revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak.

It was not simply Muslim Brotherhood supporters who had driven Mubarak from power. It was a broad-based union of every political opinion from virtually every section of Egyptian society, even peasant farmers whose opinions were never thought to count for anything. Many of those who voted for Mursi in the run-off for the presidency, chose him because they suspected Shafiq for his connections with the old regime. Mursi seemed to offer a clean break with the past.

Yet very quickly, Egypt’s new leader demonstrated a mix of paranoia and ludicrous judgment that caused unaligned voters to rue the day they had chosen to support him, in the belief that he was a new political broom. Perhaps Mursi’s biggest mistake was to put the apparently-ailing Mubarak on trial. There can be little doubt that Egypt’s former ruler had plundered its wealth for the benefit of his family and his cronies, as had Anwar Sadat before him. Nevertheless, how much more appropriate it would have been to have isolated Mubarak away from the public gaze, than to launch the very public spectacle of a full-blown trial. Mubarak’s poor health, his appearing in court in a hospital bed, whether this indisposition was genuine or not, made Mursi administration seem harsh and unfeeling.

Yet Mursi’s real error was to believe that he had a mandate to govern as he saw fit — even to try and assume, in the end unsuccessfully, thanks to popular protests, dictatorial powers greater even than Mubarak had dared arrogate to himself.

Put bluntly, Mursi lost it. Instead of reaching out to the new Egyptian political spectrum, and looking for political consensus, he fell back upon the increasingly short-sighted advice of a small clique of Muslim Brotherhood cronies, who had no interest in working with anyone else.

He refused to see that his narrow electoral win imposed on him an obligation to listen rather than masquerading absolute powers to behave as he or his small inner circle saw fit. Therein lay his failure, and with it potentially the failure of the entire Egyptian revolution. By refusing to rein in his supporters and forbid violence since his ouster, Mursi is not only guilty of throwing away lives, he is also giving Egypt’s military authorities the perfect opportunity to resume their former dominance, on the entirely legitimate grounds that they alone can protect the country from anarchy. Mursi can protest his ouster as much as he likes, but it is he, and nobody else, that betrayed the Egyptian revolution.