There are two points I cannot forget about Lino Spiteri’s stint as finance minister in the 1980s.

The first is one of his Budgets which he called ‘The year of jobs’. By the time that Budget had run its course a year later, unemployment in Malta had hit over 10,000, an all-time high.

One must remember that the labour force then was much smaller than it is now by some 30,000, which meant that the figure of 10,000 seeking a job was higher than 10 per cent of the labour force.

The other point is the fact that less than a month after December 12, 1981, some 15 Labour ministers and MPs went on State-run TV, which had become nothing less than the party’s political organ, to give their views on the results of the election, an election where the Nationalist Party, despite obtaining an absolute majority of votes, received a minority of seats and found itself in Opposition.

Oh, yes, for all it’s worth now, in that election I had voted Labour.

The TV studio set consisted of two rows of chairs, on a split level, and the Labour MPs trooped in, smirking from ear to ear. Each MP defended the perverse result with a grin that must have gone straight through the hearts of the majority of the Maltese electorate. Each defended the result as complying with the law of the land.

One of these MPs was Spiteri. His smirk, as he regurgitated what his brothers-in-arms had spewed out before him, was as endearing as theirs.

I suggest Spiteri does his readers and the rest of Malta’s electorate a favour and sticks to rewriting only his short stories, not history.