The receptionist at Labour's headquarters could hardly believe his eyes when he saw former leader Dom Mintoff walk through the door last Friday.
He hurriedly phoned one of the officials on the administration floor. "Mr Mintoff has just walked in," he said, anxiously expecting instructions on how to proceed.
"What? Mintoff?" was the quick reply, "give me some time". There was a brief uncomfortable lull, and then, the instructions straight from the top: "let him go through, immediately!"
It is ironic that the visit of one of the Labour Party founders at the party's headquarters should cause so much consternation, but Mr Mintoff's one-hour tour of the glass building was a first, since he had never been there before.
The animosity between him and former Labour leader Alfred Sant, who built the Ħamrun headquarters, meant Mr Mintoff never visited the premises.
The rift escalated into the well-documented 1998 political crisis, which saw Labour lose a snap election called just 22 months after a landslide victory in 1996.
Since Joseph Muscat took over leadership in June 2008, he has made it a point to build bridges with Labour's old guard and especially Mr Mintoff. He has repeatedly asked the 93-year-old to visit.
However, Mr Mintoff dropped in unannounced, even though there was an indication that he might call around the 35th anniversary of Republic Day on December 13.
The 93-year-old walked in with his walking stick wearing an army-green anorak with matching trousers and thick brown boots.
"We all stopped dead in our tracks," a source said. "To be honest we panicked because we weren't expecting him and weren't quite sure how to handle him... you know, do we film it? Do we not?"
Eventually, Mr Mintoff did allow some filming and pictures but only after a 30-minute meeting with Dr Muscat behind closed doors.
"Everybody out, I want to speak to him alone," he said.
After the encounter, Dr Muscat gave him a tour of the building, which had another visitor, Nationalist Party general secretary Paul Borg Olivier, who was meeting his counterpart Stefan Zrinzo Azzopardi. They crossed paths in the corridor.
It is not clear whether he liked the place but he certainly appraised its value. "If you sell this place you would make a lot of money, considering all this space," he told the entourage following him around, revealing his trademark thrift. That said, he did not appear to have been too impressed by the building's main hall. "I used to have more people in my days," he said.
The story has already triggered several reactions on the timesofmalta.com forum. Critics see it as a throwback to the past. "Instead of moving forward, it seems that the MLP is haunted by the past. Same old ideas, same old faces. Poor Joseph," one reader said.
But at the Labour headquarters, the visit was seen as a great victory which goes some way towards healing the wound between Labour's grassroots and the man many hailed as "salvatur" (the saviour).