Labour’s own past has painted it into a corner – feeling uncomfortable, it tries, in typical Muscat fashion, to wriggle out and in so doing attempts to shift the blame on the PN. The ‘mhux jien mama’ (it wasn’t me mummy) mentality is generally associated with kids, or is it? Childish. 

But it is certainly not childish to remind Labour that, as a party, it was Gaddafi’s bedfellow and long time lackey. The truth is that Labour’s shameful past has caught up with it and now, feeling uncomfortable, Joseph Muscat’s Labour tries, unsuccessfully, to depict the PN as a lackey of the disgraced Libyan dictator.

What cheek and what a shame. Does Joseph Muscat think that people are suffering from political amnesia? All he needs to do is to look around him to see that the people he himself appointed to the top positions of the Labour Party have all rubbed shoulders with the Colonel; some have had more than an inappropriate love affair over the past four decades. Alex Sceberras Trigona, the man he appointed as the PL’s International Secretary, was a close confidant of the Libyan dictator. Karmenu Vella – the man who Muscat appointed to write the PL’s electoral manifesto − was a leading cabinet member in the days when Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici shared Gaddafi’s bed. Marie Louise Coleiro Preca was secretary general when the “Give Peace a Chance” gathering was organised; now we learn, through a CIA document, that that mass gathering was paid for by the Gaddafi regime.

The Nationalist Party has challenged Labour to come clean and explain in detail the intimate relationship between Gaddafi and the PL. Can Labour confirm or deny that it ever received money and other financial assistance from the Libyan dictator? Joseph Muscat’s curt reply, “the current Labour administration did not receive any financial assistance from the Regime”, when asked, does not wash and raises more questions – because it does not deny that before 2008 Labour shared Gaddafi’s deep coffers.

The Labour government’s relationship with Gaddafi went beyond normal government good relations and was servile in the extreme: forcing all pupils to learn Arabic, publicizing the Green Book, using green in our passports, speaking in terms of ‘blood brother’ and ‘we have the same grandparents’ to Gaddafi; inviting the Colonel to address MLP mass activities; hanging pictures of the dictator in MLP clubs and receiving him warmly and with much pomp when he visited Malta and unfailingly kept his appointment touring MLP clubs.

It is an insult to any Nationalist to be told − most of all by Labour − that the PN’s relationship with Gaddafi was in anyway similar to that enjoyed by Labour.

Mr Agius is the government’s Parliamentary Whip