Not sure about the exact details but don’t forget that at the time, governments were elected on the constitution as it stood prior to the January 1987 amendments which meant that it was a majority of seats, not a majority of votes which secured a party’s eligibility to govern. (That is why we had what we had in 1981).

In 1971 it was only a handful of votes (perhaps three might have been stretching it a bit actually I think it was more like 11 or 12) on the Siggiewi district which swung the balance of seats in favour of Labour as they got one more than the PN did there in 1966.

Of course this is a very simplified version of events but that’s the gist of it and you could claim that in spite of Labour’s majority of votes being counted in the thousands in 1971 it was only that crucial handful that allowed Labour to take over.

Had he really intended to save the bank, he would have, as Mr. Apap Bologna writes, injected new share capital. We saw this happen when the US and UK governments intervened to save financial institutions a few years ago.