The Minister people loved to hate back in the day when others governed and we weren't selling our citizenship for cash was Dr Austin Gatt.

One of the main beefs the multitudes had with him was that he was seen as having been responsible for the bus service, abbreviated in the national consciousness to "tal-Arriva".

He was also hardly the epitome of diplomacy and tact, and of him it could be said that you knew where you stood.

Ironically, the trait which hardly endeared him with anyone, that of knowing exactly where you stood with him, because he would tell you in no uncertain terms, is one that the current PM has used to lavish much more than faint praise on his choice for the Presidency. How times change: when Austin Gatt is blunt and unequivocal, he is reviled for it, now Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca is lauded to the heavens and beyond by Joseph Muscat for pretty much the same thing.

Getting back to Arriva, though, it is a fact that their service could have been better. Anything under the sun can be better, if you'll forgive a platitude of cosmic proportions. With the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight, perhaps it would have been less of a shock to the national psyche if first the buses and crews had been replaced, and then the routes gradually tweaked.

The softly-softly approach, as opposed to the Big Bang method, would have been far less dramatic and might have spared us the sight and sound of so many spoilt brats, like that Uni student who made herself famous for a day or so when she pranced prettily about foul-mouthing the Minister, whining about how really, really bad the service had become.

Poor lambs, they were all hankering after the old ways, with the smelly buses and the equally smelly drivers, forgetting how hardly anyone had a good word to say for public transport. Funny how the moans and groans have virtually disappeared now, since Arriva were shown the exit and Minister Mizzi has taken over: you'd almost think that the orchestration had become no longer necessary.

Funny too how the "new operator" didn't suffer a mysterious mass-walk out of drivers on the same lines as that suffered by Arriva when they started life in the sun. You might say there's something fishy there, but I certainly couldn't comment, if you'll allow me to reprise one of Francis Urquhart's bon mots.

With the latest news from the public transport tender front, though, it's become almost obligatory to thank Austin Gatt for having managed to persuade Arriva to take on the job: his successor, the redoubtable Joe Mizzi, seems to be finding it difficult to get anyone even slightly interested. The local lads seem to have reached for their barge-pole in order to underline their point that not even with that handy tool are they going to touch the idea, McGills have taken off into the sunset and now a third bunch, whose name escapes me, have also pulled out.

Amateurs, that's what we're lumbered with running this country.