Desmond Zammit Marmarà's lengthy eulogy of Alfred Sant (May 19) is nothing more than a highly blinkered and distorted representation of facts as the majority of the electorate made clear in subsequent elections.

Mr Zammit Marmara claims that the referendum was inconclusive because the MLP tried to claim for itself the number of votes that were not cast. I hasten to inform that my wife and I and a number of relatives did not vote in the referendum because we were in the UK for the wedding of our daughter; we are all in favour of membership. Should the MLP interpret our inability to cast our votes as if we were in favour of the Switzerland in the Mediterranean, or was it Partnership by that time?

Dr Sant was unable to govern because he tried to pull too many fast ones too quickly. Who cannot remember the enormous hike in energy prices that left many people speechless, at a time when the price of oil was a fraction of that which prevails today?

Neither was the short-lived Sant administration honest with the public, when on one hand they reassured us that the local councils will never be allowed to impose their own taxes while actively planning for the introduction of a door tax.

I suggest to Mr Zammit Marmarà to consider the Sant-inspired debacle of trying to make fiscal policy on the hoof by trying to replace the globally accepted VAT with CET or whatever else he tried to invent, which resulted in raising the hackles of his finance minister by placing him in the embarrassing situation of pretending that he was in accord with Dr Sant's folly. Dr Sant declared that he was going to the country to procure a larger mandate. He failed bitterly with the consequence of keeping his MLP languishing in opposition for another decade, against the advice he was given. He proved himself diplomatically inept when he called the icon of the MLP, Dom Mintoff, a traitor.

Let us not forget either that Dr Sant kept his head low behind the parapet when the worst excesses of the MLP were unfolding, and which resulted in Wenzu Mintoff and Toni Abela plucking up enough courage to speak up against the mess that the MLP was mired in. Hardly a show of gallantry or leadership from Dr Sant.

Mr Zammit Marmarà also gives credit to Dr Sant for controlling the troublesome element in his party. Is that not an admission, if any was needed, of where all the trouble was coming from in the 1970s and 1980s? Why couldn't he condemn this criminal element before? I hope that Mr Zammit Marmarà is not going to be silly enough to suggest that Dr Sant had somehow any influence on the PN's rowdy element.

I have no doubt that Dr Sant is an unusually intelligent man, but he can hardly be described as a leader of men when he managed to lose so many good people, while retaining others who are proving to be a gross liability to the party's image of New Labour by their hankering for the obsolete Marxism which even Russia has rejected. Mr Zammit Marmarà's great leader cannot fathom the harm that Manwel Cuschieri and others of his ilk are inflicting on his party's wishful image of New Labour when they are allowed to indulge in this most repulsive behaviour.