Former Housing Authority chairman and PN-leaning columnist Marisa Micallef is to be appointed a strategy adviser with Labour, the party she has lambasted for years.

Ms Micallef will join a small team of consultants who advise party leader Joseph Muscat directly. Her main role will be to help convert voters who never considered Labour.

Although the former Housing Authority chairman has not officially started, she has already been at the Labour Party headquarters to meet members of the party executive.

At Mile End, her recruitment is seen as a victory that will further Dr Muscat's call for an alliance of progressives and moderates - but the grassroots may not be so happy.

For years, she was a main target for Labour, particularly for former leader Alfred Sant and general secretary Jason Micallef, who consistently attacked the fact that she was allowed to chair a public entity and at the same time write a "partisan column" in the press.

Labour issued dry replies to questions sent by The Sunday Times, but on this particular point the comment was that the "past is past".

"We mean business when we say we are building a new movement. We cannot look at the past but need to look at whether the people who join us now believe in our project. We are open to people who have always been Labour, people who were Labour and stopped voting for us, and even people who were never Labour voters," a spokesman said.

Ms Micallef, who contested the 1998 election for the PN, was subsequently appointed Housing Authority chairman. But she resigned in 2008, half-way through her contract, and since then she has distanced herself from the Nationalists.

In an article carried in The Times last week, she set out what Labour needs to do to win the next election.

"The new Labour Party leader obviously now puts Labour in a much better position, where electability is within reach. However, it is still a challenge for the new PL leader to overcome the anti-Labour psychological mindset."

To be a successful alternative, she wrote, Labour needs to "attract people with experience who... no longer have faith in the PN's way of running everything for the few by the few."

She has expressed concern about the need to have an electable opposition, but she may now revise why she felt Labour was unelectable.

In 2003, shortly after the general election, she wrote: "Five more years of Alfred Sant, Evarist Bartolo, Manwel Cuschieri, Joseph Muscat et al, and Tony Zarb leading this massive union which deserves better, means another unelectable Labour Party."