Gone are the hours spent banging the drum at City Gate and playing football in St James Ditch, faces reddened by the sun and also by the fiery rhetoric used.

The end, when it came, was swift: the Monti hawkers did not get the promised sympathy strikes for the precise reason that since the dispute was not an industrial one, whoever ordered a sympathy strike would have been criminally liable to damages.

In the end, what the Monti hawkers obtained was a reprieve from using St James Ditch during the week, which the government was always going to concede anyway, and a sum for the buy-back of some 12 licences and a government commitment to provide them with equal stalls which would conform to the law’s requirement rather than the present much enlarged dimensions.

As for the rest, they will now get some three weeks in Freedom Square after which they will go to the part of Merchants Street in front of the Market, despite all their (and Mr Vella’s) “over our dead bodies” claims.

Also, the government is to set up a committee that will monitor the agreement on which, however, there has to be unanimity for the government to consider anything.

The relocation of the Monti has been in the pipeline for some three years, during which the Monti people seem to have wandered from one champion to the next, and in the end plumped for the one who promised them everything. But Mr Vella, or his union’s top echelons, could have seen the writing on the wall when the Monti hawkers approached them six months ago.

Previously, Mr Vella had championed the Valletta parking attendants and obtained licences for them all over Malta. And the GWU had championed the karozzin owners. So Mr Vella may have thought he would find open doors if he championed the Monti hawkers even though they are not strictly employed workers.

The Monti debacle has also seen some other protagonists.

Like GWU’s Tony Zarb turning up to sign in sympathy at the same time the Monti hawkers were negotiating their surrender.

And Alfred Sant using the whole issue for a photo-op thus angering the entire business community of Valletta which had long been clamouring for the relocation of the Monti, as evidenced by the quite strong words the associations used in their reply.

And, of course, the Valletta outlet owners themselves who, for all their official and unofficial lobbying for the Monti relocation were pressurised by visits by Monti hawkers to sign in defence of the hawkers.