For the first time ever, hitherto unpublished documents chart the doomed attempt by a group of four PN supporters to try and heal the rift between party leader George Borg Olivier and Herbert Ganado.

The rift goes back to the late 1950s when Herbert Ganado was kicked out of the Nationalist Party and set up his own party, the Democratic Nationalist Party.

With the all-important 1962 election coming up, a group of party supporters – notably Judge Alberto Magri, Professor Victor Caruana Galizia, Dr Tommaso Fenech and, later, Dr Censu Tabone – got together to try and mediate between the two leaders.

Writing in his eighth volume of Histories of Malta (released on Friday) and breaking away from his usual delving into what happened far earlier in the history of Malta, Dr Giovanni Bonello revealed the minutes of the committee, kept by Judge Magri, and the special private diary of Dr Albert Ganado who was very much at the centre of the events.

The Magri file contains 18 letters exchanged between the participants. (It is instructive to note that, in keeping with the PN sentiment then, the letters were in Italian).

The committee’s efforts, chronicled from June 1961 to 21 September 1961 (three years – and not four as Dr Bonello says – to the day when Malta became independent), failed miserably. The committee tried to get the two leaders to stand down and allow it to choose a new leader for a re-unified party, but Dr Borg Olivier would have none of that. Besides, there was too much of a clash of personalities, and also a different evaluation of confidence in the future, for the two to agree to bury their differences and unite the party.