The Nationalists reneged on a secret agreement to appoint Dom Mintoff President in 1987, Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici claims today in an interview with The Sunday Times.

Dr Mifsud Bonnici says that as part of the discussions over amendments to the Constitution, it was originally agreed that the President would be granted wider powers - taking responsibility for the police corps among others - and that Mr Mintoff would be the first to assume such a role.

He says Mr Mintoff did not wish to take on the post but would have accepted it because there would have been political consensus on the issue.

Dr Mifsud Bonnici, who succeeded Mr Mintoff as Prime Minister in December 1984, says Mr Mintoff had always insisted that the President should be appointed either by two-thirds majority in Parliament or through a general election - though the latter proposal was opposed by a number of members of Labour's parliamentary group.

He claims that the Nationalists never objected to Mr Mintoff assuming such an important role.

"I can never forgive the PN for abandoning its commitment to appoint him President. That was one of the main objections to Censu Tabone's appointment as President in 1989. He was one of the MPs who had agreed that the President should be appointed through a two-thirds majority or a general vote. I expected the government to do what it did today - 20 years on - and appoint a President from the Labour camp."

It was actually Josie Muscat, then a Nationalist MP, who first came up with the idea of widening the powers of the Presidency in an attempt to find a breakthrough in the political crisis in the early 1980s.

However, in his autobiography President Emeritus Guido de Marco - who was heavily involved in the discussions over the Constitutional amendments - says that "at no time had Mintoff proposed to make a final agreement conditional to his being nominated President of the Republic."

(See also: http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20090125/local/the-pn-was-the-violent-party-in-the-1980s-kmb)