There is a risk that the conjunction of circumstances that brought Joseph Muscat to power might lead him down the path leading to prime ministerial government. Photo: Chris Sant Fournier

Documents shortly to be released by the National Archives will include minutes of Cabinet meetings for the years 1962 to 1981. They will give historians and the public at large an insight into the workings of successive governments under Prime Ministers George Borg Olivier and Dom Mintoff. These years cover the testing period of Maltese history leading to Independence and its immediate aftermath and the tumultuous decade of Mintoff’s two administrations between 1971 and 1981.

In Malta’s Diamond Jubilee year since Independence, these minutes represent the first draft of nascent sovereign Malta’s history, although they inevitably come with a caveat.

Cabinets meet in private. The discussions, debates, arguments and occasional flaming rows are not recorded and not made public. Only the decisions are recorded, which inevitably makes for a fairly dry read. However, ministerial memoirs, usually self-serving, tend to put the flesh on the bones.

Sadly, what will be published is incomplete. It appears that while minutes of Cabinet meetings held during the nine years of the Borg Olivier administrations are intact, those of Mintoff’s decade have “not been found” although some “notes” are still available.

There seems to be some uncertainty whether Cabinet minutes were ever kept by the two Labour administrations under Mintoff, though all the hearsay evidence from now fairly elderly former ministers who served under him seem to point to ‘notes’ or even ‘drafts’ of Cabinet minutes being unearthed by the notarial archives.

It would be tragic if the records are incomplete. Cabinet minutes enable us to appreciate how and why governments acted the way they did.

They enable us to understand the decisions that formed Malta’s development. If we do not have this evidence and do not protect our archive records, this vital information about ourselves is lost forever.

The testimony of people like Vincent Moran, health minister between 1976 and 1981, and Lino Spiteri appears to indicate that Mintoff did not attach great importance to the role of Cabinet.

Rather, he set his own agenda late at night with his private secretary. Next morning, those ministers concerned – not the whole Cabinet – were summoned, together with his (unelected) advisers, to discuss the issue in question.

One Cabinet meeting which Spiteri recalled Mintoff summoning was simply an excuse for giving under-performing ministers a public roasting. This had a predictable Maltese result.

The minister concerned gave the prime minister a tongue-lashing of his own and walked out. Cabinet discipline in this case was neither respected nor enforced.

The lack of Cabinet documents today reinforces a picture of an over-domineering prime minister who was not simply first among equals but who, for better or for worse, ran a centralised ‘command premiership’.

The Mintoff example is not unusual. In Britain, during the Tony Blair government, Cabinet meetings were stripped down to their bare essentials, sometimes lasting as little as 45 minutes, with the real business of government transacted elsewhere.

A joke circulating in 2000 asked why only half the Cabinet drank tea: because Cabinet meetings were over before the trolley had gone all around the room.

So it can be seen that Mintoff’s way of conducting business is not a peculiarly Maltese phenomenon.

What might the Cabinet minutes, when they are published, tell us about Maltese Cabinet government today?

Under our system of government, the executive arm is formally a collective one in the shape of a Cabinet of ministers, supplemented by a cadre of subordinate parliamentary secretaries. Faced with the need to present a united front against Parliament and the electorate, a governing convention of ‘collective Cabinet responsibility’ has developed to ensure a common line.

That’s the theory. The practice is inevitably different. All single party governments (and the same applies to the Opposition ‘shadow government’) contain different views, and interests, within them.

A running theme of the Blair government was an alleged split between Blair’s Downing Street and Gordon Brown’s Treasury on the issue of the single European currency.

And it would not surprise me at all if it transpired – once the Cabinet minutes emerge in the future – that there had been a split between Castille and the minister of finance over the cash-for-citizenship scheme.

To a degree, the way Cabinet does its business reflects the style and values of the government concerned and, specifically, of the Prime Minister. Thus, I have no doubt that the way the Borg Olivier, Fenech Adami and Gonzi administrations conducted Cabinet government followed a well-ordered, conventional path.

Alfred Sant, a democrat to his finger tips, also followed the conventions of Cabinet government while Mintoff did not. None of them thought it proper to hold Cabinet meetings away from Castille, ‘among the people’, and I suspect they would all have regarded it as a pointless populist gesture to do so.

Malta must be careful that Cabinet government is not replaced by prime ministerial government

Cabinet government should be a serious business. It is the pivot around which the country’s good governance turns.

It is Cabinet ministers who make the decisions in government. Those decisions are often hard ones. Cabinet is the place where the hardest ones are made.

Bearing this out, Spiteri recounted the historic Cabinet meeting under Prime Minister Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici which led his government to put forward proposals to amend the Constitution to ensure the party which got the overall majority of valid votes gained the right to form the government through a corrective mechanism.

If the issue is not hard it should not get to Cabinet – though I sometimes had the impression from my limited knowledge of Cabinet decisions in Malta as a ministerial adviser that issues are elevated to that level which should not be, thus slowing down the machinery of government and needlessly using up precious ministerial time.

In its weekly meetings, Cabinet should wrestle with issues that are too big to be made by individual ministers because they have wider international or domestic political implications requiring a more rounded and broader discussion.

I do personally question – though I have no evidence one way or the other – whether such a Cabinet discussion ever took place over the ill-judged Individual Investment Programme. If, as I suspect, it did not, I think one can agree that the results are now plain to see. Before launching the scheme, it could have done with the input of the older, wiser heads in today’s government offering their candid and genuine views.

Maltese politics has undoubtedly become more presidential in nature. Malta must be careful that Cabinet government is not replaced by prime ministerial government. There is a risk that the conjunction of circumstances that brought Joseph Muscat to power – a massive electoral majority, a united party, an overweening personal authority – might lead him down that path.

It would be salutary for him to recognise that this would be a mistake. The cash-for-citizenship debacle proves it. Once the political circumstances change – as they can do dramatically, rapidly and unexpectedly – then so does the centre of gravity within government.

The truth is that a prime minister is both commanding and vulnerable. History repeatedly shows us that he may dominate the political landscape today. But this does not mean that he is in secure and permanent control of all that he surveys tomorrow.