The feature carried by The Sunday Times of Malta that declassified UK Foreign Office reports had expressed scepticism over Eddie Fenech Adami’s description of Malta’s political situation in 1983 goes to show how diplomats can sometimes be detached from reality.
The reports, written by then deputy British high commissioner Peter Marshall, were based on a conversation between Dr Fenech Adami, then Opposition leader, and Janet Young, at the time a junior UK Foreign Office minister, during a meeting in London in 1983.
Mr Marshall is said to have been hesitant to agree that the result of the 1981 election – where Labour won a majority of seats despite the Nationalist Party winning an absolute majority of votes – was due to gerrymandering. He also suggested that there was no hint of difference between Dom Mintoff and the Church and that Mr Mintoff was not planning to resign.
It also emerged that the author of the report was sceptical of Dr Fenech Adami’s “bleak” picture of 1980s Malta, where democracy was endangered and civil liberties eroded. Mr Marshall overlooked even what was happening before his own eyes in Malta at the time.
In view of such claims – which have, of course, all proved to be incorrect – it is worthwhile setting the record straight.
The 1981 election result – which had been described as “perverse” by Mr Mintoff himself – was a clear case of gerrymandering and led to the biggest crisis in Malta’s constitutional history. Never before in the democratic world had a political party been denied the right to govern under a proportional representation electoral system despite winning an absolute majority of votes.
But that is what happened to the PN, which received 51 per cent of the popular vote but, still, Labour governed for five and a half years, against the will of the people. Thankfully, a constitutional amendment that was accepted by both parties in 1987 led to a repeat of the previous result being avoided and the PN was elected to power.
The 1981 – 1987 period was one of the darkest chapters in Malta’s history and it is very difficult to understand how a British diplomat could have been sceptical about Dr Fenech Adami’s point of view when the situation was already so manifestly bleak.
Those years were characterised by an attack on the Church and its schools by the Socialist government as well as the ransacking of the Curia by a group of Labour supporters, again proving the British Foreign Office documents wrong.
Under Labour’s illegitimate rule from 1981 – 1987, political violence was endemic, freedom of expression was curtailed, the rule of law was threatened, corruption was institutionalised, the police force was politicised, the State broadcasting service became the mouthpiece of the party in government and Malta pursued a dangerous foreign policy in which it flirted with despotic regimes such as North Korea and Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya.
The state of affairs became no better when Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici replaced Mr Mintoff who resigned in 1984, another wrong observation by the UK Foreign Office.
The distorted analysis made by a senior British diplomat about Malta in 1983 just shows how members of diplomatic missions can sometimes misread a political situation prevailing in the country they are based in.
Thankfully, in this case, the report in question seems to have represented the views of a lone diplomat and, on the election of a Nationalist government in 1987, Malta and Britain opened a new chapter in relations between the two countries that remain excellent till today.