Fantastic. So now we are going to have to celebrate the 35th anniversary of ‘Jum il-Helsien’, when Malta was sold to Gaddafi

Muammar Gaddafi and Prime Minister Mintoff waving to the crowd at the main entrance to the Auberge de Castille on the day Britain’s lease on its military base in Malta expired, 31 March 1979

The news was announced today that the government has set up a foundation to organise the celebration of national festivities in the next five years.

The foundation is chaired by that energetic extrovert and go-getter, Oliver Friggieri, a man who makes even an old dog plagued by leishmaniasis look like the life and soul of the party, and who can’t even organise his own clothes let alone a national festivity.

I suppose he’s there on the recommendation of his best mate, Godfrey Grima, or maybe it’s just that he’s exceptionally good at hiding his light under a bushel.

One of the members is that absolutely useless prat Albert Marshall, a man who talks, thinks and behaves as though he got a shot in the arm round about when Jimi Hendrix choked in his own sick, slept for three decades, woke up again and carried right on where he left off, while the rest of us wonder who the hell chipped him out of the 1970s fossil substratrum to head the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts and deputise for the chairman at Public Broadcasting Services, two other roles this government gave him.

The other members are Simone Mizzi (Din L-Art Helwa), Andrea Cassar (of Super One’s Liquorish), Philip Farrugia Randon, John Zarb, Jason Busuttil (director of Super One and a carnival organiser), Lou Bondi, Gianni Zammit (the DJ), Ray Mangion and Mario Farrugia Borg, this last being the man who made a great big show of converting to Islam, took up with the pro-Gaddafi Libyan community centred on the Corradino school and mosque, claims to have persuaded them to vote Labour (as though they needed any persuading, given their support for Gaddafi) and has now been given a full-time salaried job in the prime minister’s office, as the prime minister’s consultant on “the Muslim community”.

If you’re wondering about his inclusion in this foundation for the organisation of national festivities, wonder no more because here’s your explanation.

“Malta is set to celebrate a number of historic anniversaries”, informed sources told The Times of Malta, and “next year, Malta will celebrate the 10th anniversary of its accession to the EU, the 35th anniversary of Freedom Day and 50 years since Malta’s independence.”

Given that 31 March 1979 is the day Mintoff sold Malta to Gaddafi, making us a vassal of Libya, which was then a pariah state, and subservient to its terrorist-sponsor murderous dictator, there you have the reason for the inclusion of Mario Farrugia Borg in the organising committee for the celebration of this glorious event.

How they are going to frame Gaddafi in a suitable context, given what has happened since and the fact that he features prominently in the photographs and footage of that day in Maltese history, is anyone’s guess.

As for the rest of the committee members, if they can’t have any self-respect perhaps they could at least have some sense of historic accuracy. People who were raised in brainwashed Mintoffian families with little or no education can be forgiven for believing the Mintoffian myth about ‘Jum il-Helsien’, but nobody else has any such excuse – especially not since the release in 2009, when the 30-year embargo elapsed under Britain’s Freedom of Information law, of all the relevant documents which give us the true details of the situation beyond the Mintoffian lies. Those documents include detailed transcripts of Mintoff’s telephone calls to British Prime Minister James Callaghan.

The reality is that with a very weak press and a massively ignorant – think Venezuela and Chavez – population, Mintoff was able to package and sell his massive failure, and the catastrophe it engendered, as a heroic success. His disastrous inability to persaude the British to stay on was completely turned on its head and made into the myth of ‘kicking the British out’.

The facts are these. Britain’s lease contract on its military base in Malta ended on 31 March 1979. This was contractual. The date was put into the contract when the contract was signed five years earlier, in 1974. As the day approached, Britain indicated that it would consider renewing the contract. Mintoff, who learned well at his money-lender mother’s knee, thought he would seize the opportunity to raise the rent.

Mintoff used bullying tactics and brute force to get his way, not skill and intelligence, and though the former tactics were useful with Maltese businessmen, they were obviously going to be useless in situations where he had no leverage, as when negotiating with Britain.

Not being half as bright or as skilful a negotiator as his fans think he was, Mintoff overshot the mark – a fatal error for somebody negotiating in any situation, let alone somebody negotiating without leverage. He asked for way too much money for something the British no longer really wanted or needed but which they might have considered keeping for much less.

You know how it is when something catches your eye in an antiques shop? You’re not quite sure whether you like it or not, whether you want it or not, but think you might have it if it’s only, say, fifty euros. But then the shopkeeper asks you for 500 euros and that instantly makes up your mind for you. You are clear now that you neither like it nor want it, so much so that you are not even going to bother trying to negotiate for a lower price.

That’s pretty much what happened with Mintoff and the British. He asked for too much money to have the lease renewed and the British decided they didn’t need or want Malta anyway, because they had Cyprus at one end of the Mediterranean and at a push, Gibraltar at the other.

So they packed up and steamed out, and left Mintoff in a panic not only as to where he was going to get the money to make up for what he’d lost from the British, but also – and here begins the story of how Malta’s back was well and truly broken – what on earth he was going to do with a whacking great naval dockyard employing thousands of people, but no navy to keep it going.

Not only did Mintoff lose the rent money we got from Britain, but he also lost all the business the Royal Navy gave the dockyard. We tend to forget, if we ever knew, that this is precisely how our troubles began.

So Mintoff turned to his old friend and hero Gaddafi, Gaddafi attached some really thick strings to his money and to Mintoff’s limbs, and spent the next few years pulling them hard.

As for the dockyard, the rest – as they say – is history. With virtually its sole customer (the Royal Navy) gone and with Prime Minister Mintoff unable to shut the yard down and make those thousands of people redundant because he would lose face and blow up his own myth of performing a heroic act for Malta by ‘kicking out the British’, the drydocks became a crippling albatross round Malta’s neck.

Kicking out the British? Come on. In March 1979 Malta had been a republic for more than four years already. The British had long since been ‘kicked out’. We could have kept Britain’s military base here and been all the richer for it, and saved ourselves the hundreds of millions which were poured into the drydocks, and all those attendant nightmares that came with it. That’s what Mintoff wanted, but because he was so avaricious, and such a bad negotiator, he screwed it up. And every 31 March since then, we have marked the fact that he screwed it up.

Now, we actually have a foundation, chaired by Oliver Friggieri no less, and with some prominent names as members, to organise celebrations to mark the 35th anniversary of Mintoff’s catastrophic failure to persuade the British to retain their military base here, and how he lied about it afterwards to save face.

For God’s sake, all we have to do is look at Italy, an EU member state with a whacking great US military base in Sigonella, Sicily, and at Cyprus, which became a fully autonomous EU member state with a British military base tacked onto it.

We could have done the same, saved ourselves a lot of trouble and money, earned ourselves rather a lot of money, and above all, avoided being run over by Gaddafi. And we would still have joined the European Union and been fully autonomous, just like Cyprus. And Italy.

So let’s go ahead and celebrate, by virtue of the myriad talents of this new foundation, the 35th anniversary of Mintoff’s tremendous, far-reaching cock-up and the vast lies that followed to cover the mess that he made. And let’s ignore the fact that Cyprus didn’t ‘kick the British out’ but still became an EU member state.

As our prime minister likes to say, why not? Any excuse for a party, even if it’s thrown by that mouldy old bore, Oliver Friggieri.