I first met Dr Buontempo about seven years ago at the birthday party of a mutual friend. We were sitting on the same table and I was impressed by the gentleness and courtesy of this charming man. One year later we met again and I was surprised to find that he still remembered my name and many things about me, and he started conversing as if there had not been a one year interruption. “And I’m not even one of your constituents!” I remember joking.

He was elected to parliament on the Labour side last year with around four thousand votes. “I am one of the top ten amongst the thirty MLP members of parliament as regards number of votes, but I feel like I am one of the least important.” His humility is evident throughout our meeting. We start off at his office in the main street of Senglea, next to the church and in front of the Nationalist Party Club. As we walk out a woman approaches him and tells him that one of his constituents had passed away the previous night. He decides there and then to visit the widow. I feel like an intruder as I enter the house but he takes the woman’s hands and lets her pour her heart out, making comforting gestures every now and then. I feel very awkward and focus on the plastic flowers on the wall. We go out back into the sunshine and he tells me of his father’s death. “He was like a god to me and I loved him, too much perhaps. He passed away three and a half years ago and exactly two years later, on the same date, my son was born. I named him Giovanni after my father.”

We get into his car, I tell him that I like it and he tells me that he bought it second hand. We drive to the Vittoriosa Tuesday market and walk out amongst the women shopping. Stefan is an architect with a doctorate in social housing and is a fellow of several learned societies but everyone that we meet, with no exception, addresses him by his first name. I comment on this and he tells me that voters are not interested in qualifications but in the humanity of a politician. Another woman comes up to us and tells him of her son’s drug problem. “He does not want to work because he does not want to pay off his debts. I went to the police to report his drug taking,” the heartbroken mother confides. She wants to know what Stefan will do about her problem and meanwhile other people approach me, perhaps thinking that I am his secretary, and ask me if they could speak to Stefan. They tell him the most intimate details of their lives, I am deeply embarrassed but he takes it all in his stride. I am impressed with the trust that these people put in their representative but I am also interested in how he tackles their problems. “Every morning is spent following up cases. A bureaucratic government is the cause of much suffering and I find it hard to tolerate that. In the evenings when not in Parliament I meet people who want to speak to me privately of their problems.” I ask him about his professional practice and he tells me that it has become almost non existent. “In Malta we are amateur or part time politicians because we do not have the time and the resources to do proper research.”

What would he do if he were prime minister? He throws back his head with his typical boyish and unaffected laugh. “That idea has never even entered my mind!” I press him and he says that his dream would be to give a serene life to everyone on the island. “For myself and my wife Natasha, but especially for her, I’d want a little privacy because it bothers her sometimes to be a politician’s wife.”

We eventually settle at a table on the beautiful Senglea waterfront and he buys us two soft drinks. The man at the bar comes out and opens the umbrella, shielding us from the sun and Stefan muses that politics is a drug. “A dangerous drug, I cannot do without it because I love it and feel that I can make a difference since I love what I am doing.” And his parting words: “If you believe in what you are doing then you must carry on!”