Lino Spiteri has waved us goodbye. He will be deeply missed by his family and others who were close to him. Many more will feel the great void of his departure. He leaves behind a large testament.

His personal qualities may be recited only at the risk of sounding hyperbolical, as if it were impossible for so much to be ­contained in a single person.

Combined with his polymath abilities and talents, his intelligence, creativeness, conscientiousness and generosity made him a truly renaissance man.

He could be economist, politician, journalist, opinion leader, poet, novelist and thinker at once and be good at each of them, and that without once neglecting his loyalty to family and friends.

Many will remember him for his impact on politics. He entered the fray during one of the most difficult passages in Malta’s national, cultural and ­democratic transitions, as a young man in his early 20s, fighting his corner fearlessly with word and pen.

He suffered and endured, unflinching, the penalties for being in the vanguard of Malta thrust into an open society and modern nation. He behaved like a hero, not like a victim.

His first stint in politics was followed by an extended period honing and consolidating his skills in another field he proved to be the best at: economics and finance. Compressing in two years a three-year degree, he dazzled his Oxford professors and obtained the much-coveted first in Politics and Economics.

Later, from his cockpit at the Central Bank, he navigated with singular skill the waters of the most delicate phase of Malta’s banking and fiscal history. He then returned to the hustings of politics and spent five more terms in Parliament, becoming Malta’s most refined politician.

In a deeply polarised Malta, Lino was the one politician who successfully plugged the fracture between the two sides, and this without losing sight of his essential convictions.

Having experienced his formative years in the thick of the bitterest political strife, he taught himself to listen to the other side of every argument, outgrowing the tribal national approach to politics in search of the national good.

No one can tell what politics would have looked like had he become Labour Party leader 22 years ago, but it can safely be guessed that the politics of the last generation would have played out much differently if he had. Lino became the best prime minister that Malta never had.

I recall the occasion, six years ago, of the launching of his festschrift Lino, a Tribute, the book of friends celebrating his 70th birthday. The large audience that packed the hall contained the most fascinatingly disparate assortment of people from different and differing social backgrounds, political leanings, points of view, affiliations and persuasions. People whom you wouldn’t imagine even speaking to each other outside sat in the same rows, their regard for Lino the one thing they shared in common. No national leader dead or alive ever comprised in his person such levels of consensus.

Notwithstanding his staggering political stature, he liked to remember that politics was a transient occupation; that office was in the gift of the people to entrust, and not an entitlement. Politics gave him satisfaction, but also disillusion. It was not adversity that let him down in politics, but cynicism, the loss of innocence.

Lino became the best prime minister that Malta never had

Writing was a more loyal companion. It unbridled his mind. His quick-firing intellect never ceased to observe, analyse and synthesise. He became Malta’s foremost and most heeded columnist. His resources seemed unlimited.

And then there was the creative side to his writing, his literary writings that were his secret love and aspiration. His fictional representation of political life in particular remains unmatched as a canvas of Maltese politics drawn at the front line.

Born in the lower rungs of the working class, an only son, orphan­ed early and disabled, Lino rose to success and importance by sheer personal determination and more than a little help from a mother with a boundless belief in him.

His disability, a source of personal discomfort but also a de­mand­ing driver that pushed him hard, he endured without complaint or expectation of pity or preference. He had it so brilliantly under control it made you ignore it. That’s how he wanted it.

It was typical of how he ap­proach­ed everything else in life: so thoroughly and competently that you could have been fooled he did it effortlessly. He could have comfortably played the part of the big fish in a small pond. Instead he defied smallness itself, recognising in it the root of complacency and mediocrity.

Character, courage of conviction and integrity bestowed on him a natural authority, which when required he displayed sovereignly and effectively, whether he was dealing with subordinates, peers, or higher. Where others cowered he stood his ground.

When illness struck he faced it with the same fortitude that marked the rest of his life’s trials. He described what he felt, on first being diagnosed with cancer, in one encompassing word: surreal.

For two-and-a-half years he negotiated this surreal passage between optimism and realism with sober intelligence – hoping, praying, preparing. Eschewing denial, he soldiered on as best he could, until his body let him down finally and irreversibly.

What shone as he faced the end was his immense dignity, one to instruct and humble the healthiest. He grasped every shred of his remaining consciousness to keep in touch with his life and what was happening to him. “I am waning,” he said in his hospital bed, as if meaning to chronicle his life to its last breath.

So now goodbye, dear friend. Your absence will be hard to bear. What is left for those who were close to you is their fortune to have been part of your big life, a life brimming with tribulations and joy and hard work and achievement, and one that enriched so many other lives it touched.

Editor’s note: For many years Lino Spiteri occupied this space and unfailingly offered thought-provoking analysis. Alas, no more. We bid farewell to our columnist and offer our deepest condolences to his family. May he rest in peace.