Three of the Maltese internees, Formosa, Ganado and Cossai, together with Enrico Mizzi in front of the internment camp at Uganda If you think the PL–PN rivalry is fierce, strap in. During the Second World War, the Constitutionalist Party accused members of the Partito Nazionale of conspiring with Mussolini. Was Gerald Strickland onto something, or was this a calculated move to neutralise his main political rival, Enrico Mizzi? This episode remains one of the darkest chapters

The key sitting came on 9 February. In a charged Council session convened to rush through emergency powers, Sir Ugo Mifsud rose to oppose the measure as an assault on “fundamental rights” and a dangerous bending of constitutional limits in wartime. Partway through his speech he collapsed on the floor of the chamber. He never recovered, dying two days later. Despite the shock, the bill still went through, with George Borg Olivier the only member to vote against it. In 1942, de

In the first days of February 1942, Malta was being bombed, squeezed by shortages, and still haunted by the possibility of a successful invasion. In that siege mindset, the colonial administration decided to be more drastic. It stopped treating “pro-Italian” sentiment as just politics or culture and started treating it as a security problem. In this view, the most logical step would be to remove the ‘threat’ from the island altogether, an escalation from detention to exile. T