The way the author tells it, it was 1975 and Dom Mintoff was hurriedly working to set up the national airline.

After some initial toying with an alliance with other airlines, the choice had fallen on Pakistan International Airline. The reason was the most recent splitting up of the Muslim part of the Indian subcontinent into Pakistan and Bangladesh as a result of which PIA had a number of extra planes.

Mintoff had a small group of civil servants working on this project. One day the group boarded a domestic flight on a Fokker F27 between Lahore and Islamabad. Halfway during the flight the plane was caught in monsoon weather which forced the pilot to turn back to Lahore.

In those days domestic flights allowed animals to be carried aboard. Since a bumpy landing was expected, chattels and movables were made secure in one way or another. The author was given a lamb to keep on his lap, but one of his colleagues (named in the book), got to hold an air hostess on his.

The landing was terribly bumpy, so much so that a couple of cockroaches fell on the passengers as the plane hit the runway.

I doubt if Mintoff ever got to know of this adventure. What he grumbled about was about the time that setting up the airline was taking.

There is a big difference, I believe, between the Castille team of Mintoff and the subsequent teams, especially in Labour administrations. Dom Mintoff used civil servants brought up under the British, whereas, from what I can gather, both Joseph Muscat and Robert Abela mostly tend to use party members.

This book gives the reader the impression that working for Dom Mintoff was no walk in the park, given Dom's fiery and suspicious character, his habit of working till late at night and appointments running late time and again.

Still, those were heady days - the backbone of the new republic was being set up. Not just, as mentioned, Air Malta, but also Sea Malta, Bank of Valletta, etc. The small group at Castille was involved in most of these new initiatives having to cope, most times, with Mintoff's unpredictable character and the way he many times let people believe he was going one way but then he turned around and went the other way.

During his time at Castille, the author was deeply involved in such issues as the oil crisis after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Malta's fruitless push for offshore oil exploration, the 1972 agreement with NATO for the use of the country's military facilities, ensuring an adequate water supply and Mintoff's determination to correct the country's trade imbalance.

From 1975 to 1983 he headed the Ministry of Development, Energy, Ports and Telecommunications under Minister Wistin Abela and from 1983 to 1987 the Ministry of Trade and Economic Planning under Minister Lino Spiteri. After the change of government he headed the Ministry for the Development of the Tertiary Sector under Minister Manwel Bonnici until he retired in 1988.

The beginning of his work at Castille was inauspicious. Coppini had been invited to attend a Cabinet meeting of the PN administration and, when asked for his opinion, had spoken against the Deutsche Welle project. Mintoff, who was proposing the deal, found out what Coppini had said and called him to remonstrate.

Then, when Mintoff became premier, Coppini was asked to work on the Radio Monte Carlo relay station idea and he suggested Pembroke as the best site without consulting Mintoff, who again chewed him up.

Then, as said, he was involved in the setting up of Air Malta, although to his eternal regret he just missed out on signing the cheque for the registration of the airline.

From the terrible night two days before Christmas 1972 when he was suspended and told, at 11pm, to hand over all the office keys and any work papers to the policeman who would call for them early the next day (nothing happened of this grotesque suspension); Coppini seems to have become Mintoff's preferred victim for his diatribes. Yet he left Castille well after the mighty Dom.

After the Air Malta launch (which also involved matters to do with the airport) he moved on to Wistin Abela and oil. Those were the years of the oil spike by the oil producers. Mintoff sent Abela (and Coppini) all around the world in search of oil which Mintoff preferred to get in exchange for political favours. These travels were mainly to non-aligned countries including Iran, then in the midst of the revolution and the occupation of the American embassy. But the results were meagre.

Next, in this Dom-sponsored world tour was North Korea, in a delegation headed by Wistin Abela and a meeting with Kim Il Sung, followed with a stopover in Peking (now Beijing).

Coppini's last two jobs for Mintoff were the preparation for the introduction of reverse osmosis to tackle the dryness of the Maltese season and helping out in the paperwork in preparation for the agreement regarding the British military presence in Malta.