This will be my last article for The Malta Independent on Sunday. I said last week that the time might have arrived for me to stand in front of the mirror and take a look. This is my mirror and what interests me is only what I see in it and not what others think they may see for themselves.

There have been very few instances in my life when I have taken the trouble to bother about what others have said or their version of who I could be and what I could be made of.

I would say that only when I thought that people had made unfair judgments about me, my intentions or my work, that I came back with a reply. With most I did not and that has suited me fine.

I have worked with different editors on the Independent, each one with his own approach. Roger Degiorgio, that fine purveyor of what is good for the media, made the proposal to me at a breakfast meeting we had at the Corinthia years ago.

I had written for newspapers for many years, particularly during the colonial administration. As a young man then, I was determined to contribute towards freeing my country from colonialism. I wasn’t active in politics at the time but I knew Fr Dionysus Mintoff who lived down my street. He used to stand in for me with the Union Press, taking my articles to the Malta News for publication. I am grateful to him to this day for hiding my identity the way he did for the best part of eight years.

For many years I had the same talent Roger has, that of surrounding myself with people who were excellent for what I was doing at the time.

I did it as Minister of Industry and more so as Minister of Tourism when I fine-tuned the people who advised me and who worked with me from the outside. I believe that while Roger has kept his talent intact, I have since lost mine.

Too often have I put my trust in people who were not worth it for me to believe, anymore that the knack of selecting the best from around me is still active.

I have been lucky though that people who have chosen collaborators for me, with whom I have worked and still do, on most occasions have chosen well and made my life much easier than it would have been had they not understood that for me, it is my product that comes first.

On The Malta Independent on Sunday, I also worked with Anthony Manduca a quiet, reserved person and a cautious editor. There weren’t many occasions when he called to see if I felt strongly enough about some phrase or sentence in my articles he would have liked me to change, but on the few occasions he did over the years, he was always the epitome of courtesy and nothing short of that.

I started off on the Independent daily with Fr Noel Grima, the current editor of The Malta Independent on Sunday. I am certain that, after having known me for longer, at least from my writings Fr Noel is now in a better position to make his own judgments rather than rely on the judgments of others.

We have worked well together. He is a conscientious editor and our lives together on Sundays have been both peaceful and professional.

It grieves me to have to leave this Sunday appointment, but since I can no longer plan my future in 20-year chunks I now have to take care of other important things that I feel I should be doing while I am still relatively healthy and still able to kick a laptop around.

This weekly appointment with the thousands of readers of the Independent on Sunday has brought me some joy and some bitterness Most articles have produced their own reactions, some favourable and a few not so favourable. It is customary for those who are about to go their separate ways to remember the good times. I choose to remember what I consider to have been most disgraceful reaction of all.

I was already writing for the Independent in the early nineties when Alfred Sant was elected leader of the MLP in very dubious circumstances. Until then Sant had been president of the Party and before that, or concurrent with that, chairman of a relatively obscure publications department that from time to time churned out some printed material and cassettes of Mintoff speeches to sell at Party mass meetings.

He seemed to be enveloped in that work, hardly contributing to any of the debates within the party except in grunts. A worn out briefcase under his arm, he would sit at the back of a room during a meeting and leave without a word when it suited him.

When our colleague Joe Sciberras died suddenly, Sant was co-opted to Parliament through Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici’s behind-the-scenes activism.

The only thing I felt I knew about him at the time was that he was close to Karmenu.

He also gyrated in a small group, which included a former student in Communist East Germany Mario Vella, and a few others who kept themselves to themselves.

At that time those who knew the party from inside, also knew that the front-runner for the leadership was Lino Spiteri, in whose group the post-Mintoff period was regularly discussed.

I did not belong to any group, Lino’s included. Lino’s primary supporter for the leadership was Deputy Leader Joe Cassar and others now close to Sant, foremost being that other leadership composite Charles Mangion.

Alfred Sant was always considered to be in Lino’s shopping cart, not a contender in any sense of the word. When, after the leadership contest Sant emerged as the winner, I wrote an article for the Independent titled “The Militant Fraction”.

To me the Party had been taken over by leftist militants. Little did I know at the time that when his only shot at playing Prime Minister came round, Sant would take the MLP to the right.

My feeling at the time was that, after Mintoff had fought everyone there was to fight and had quarrelled with everyone there was to quarrel with at home and abroad and, especially after the ludicrous KMB political years when the new prime minister tried to outdo his predecessor in having his way over whatever one considered to be right and sensible, the party and the island needed someone who would bring in a long period of peace that would no longer fill the papers with the next local or foreign altercation.

Militancy, I felt, was the last thing anyone needed or wanted, hence my article. Sant responded some weeks later in an interview on what is now PBS; he said that in the 1992 election two ministers had not been allowed to contest with the party. One had not been permitted because he had been suspended and I was the only other minister who had not contested. Sant confirmed on the phone just after the interview, before he left Television House, that he had been referring to me. I told him among other things that his was a blatant, cruel lie.

If he did not know it then, he must have known the truth for years. The kindest thing I can say today is that someone, who the party has since thrown to the pigs, fed that lie to him.

Sant had ample opportunity to retract and throughout the years he allowed anyone who wanted to believe his lie that he had told the truth. He did not and the rest is history.

I had the guts to leave a party I no longer believed in. For Sant, even though these events are supposed to have happened before his time, that was unacceptable. You couldn’t leave the great party he now led. You must have been kicked out.

Well, he lied and when today I hear him say that he will continue to tell people the truth, I cringe. I believe that his knee-jerk reaction to a simple article was to lie. In my view Sant has his own interpretation of what constitutes truth and that is what he will tell the people. It is just the way he is put together.

As I prepare to leave the Independent on Sunday by the front door, I want to thank everyone without distinction for being around when I was writing these articles. To those who have approved of my articles, thank you.

To those who have disagreed with me, an equal thank you. Isn’t it great to be able to disagree in a democracy and not to have to follow some demagogue who truly believes that he is the only guardian of the word?

To my editor and my readers, au revoir.

To Dr Sant: Enjoy my absence.

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