There is a reason why Dom Mintoff only got a third-class degree at Oxford despite having nothing to do but work at it, Mr Cachia.

He wasn’t at all bright. He just had street cunning. Bright people can see the bigger picture. People with street cunning see the narrow and immediate problem.

“Wara kullhadd gharef” – no, some people can see the problems before they happen.

fact needed to form a true opinion. True. Your reply while generous, is still formed to belittle the man in all shapes and forms. As expected.
mass unemployment. Did not happen due to the generous assistance of Libya. I believe it was not an easy sell but the money arrived nonetheless.
The British were leaving anyway. The man expected more for what he thought Malta was worth and did not sell the island for peanuts, IF they were going to give that much to begin with.
As a final thought, There is the age-old saying that `wara, kullhadd huwa gharef`. So true, yes?

The British government did not renew its lease on its military base in Malta, which expired on 31st March 1979 (which means that ‘Freedom Day’ should be celebrated on 1 April) because Mintoff overestimated his leverage and tried to put up the rent. The British reaction was “forget it – we don’t need it that much and were thinking of leaving anyway”.

In other words, he handed them an excuse to pull out when, if he had left the rent at the level it was or even reduced it, they might well have stayed.

Mintoff then faced a massive problem of how to sell his failure to his supporters and worse than that, what to do with the now-useless drydocks and its large workforce who were effectively redundant, and how to avoid having his people round on him and blame him for the catastrophe of the British pulling out, resulting in mass unemployment.

He was lucky, because the press was weak, there was no internet, and people were ignorant and illiterate. So he managed to sell his failure at negotiating a renewal of the lease as a great victory in “kicking out the British”, and then he went to Muammar Gaddafi for money to help him keep the drydocks afloat even though it had no business. (The drydocks then became a serious problem, financially, for the next 20 years or so.)

These are facts documented in British government records that became public after 30 years under that country’s Freedom of Information laws. They include transcripts of meetings and telephone conversations in which Mintoff begs the British to stay, then begs the British prime minister to come to Malta for the ‘Freedom Day’ ceremony.

Facts are important before you form an opinion.

No doubt you would have justified Muammar Gaddafi’s bankrolling of Mintoff’s government, when Mintoff lost all that income from the military base due to his abysmal negotiating skills, as “money that was spent on children’s allowances”.

This is what we’ve become.