According to Lino Spiteri “Muscat is putting the national interest before Labour’s political interest”, (The Sunday Times of Malta, June 2). Well, the fill-ing of all sorts of committees and councils with Labour people, ‘billboard’ boys and girls and generally all those who endorsed Muscat’s Labour at the last election certainly belies that observation.

Spiteri, after years of pontificating about the evils of politicising the civil service, remained strangely silent to Muscat’s very first appointment, that of head of the civil service. The appointment of Mario Cutajar, a militant Labourite and trade unionist, hardly conformed to what Spiteri was preaching all the time. But once Cutajar was appointed, there was not a squeak from Spiteri.

All new governments inherit the good and the bad of the ones they follow. Muscat’s Labour Government inherited low (by current EU standards) levels of unemployment and an economy that had managed to do well irrespective of the difficult international economic climate.

Spiteri likes to remind us of his experience in 1996 on taking office as Finance Minister in the government of Alfred Sant. Well it is also pertinent to remind all that in 1987 the Eddie Fenech Adami government inherited a country with record unemployment, an unproductive labour corps, a stagnant economy and a country whose infrastructure resembled that of a third world country. And guess who the outgoing Minister of Finance in 1987 was? Yes, it was Lino Spiteri.