Mario Cutajar, the previous civil-service chief has been awarded a plum job as chairman of Heritage Malta. Historians should be happy with this news. Mario Cutajar is known to be responsible for increasing the public employee headcount by more than 25%. An excellent way to beat unemployment. He may do the same at Heritage Malta and bloat it with unproductive employees, but make sure you tell Mario you vote Labour though, otherwise you may not get a good salary.
Mario gets a job at Heritage Malta because he is Labour, he likes history and doesn’t want to retire. Sorry historians, you don’t get a chance at running public institutions unless you are part of the Labour Club.
Ironically, Mario never got his heritage and history in order at the OPM. He did send a batch of OPM documents from the 1960s and 1970 to the National Archives, but most of the OPM archives have remained classified under his tenure. Mario never appointed a research director within his unit to sort the OPM’s archive and catalogue it appropriately. I wonder what he is going to contribute to Heritage Malta apart from employing Labourites.
Would be interesting to hear comments from various people in headship positions on their experiences at conferences and interviews when he was around. Self-conscious to the extreme – to the point of asking his audience to “share the joke” if he even heard a smidgen of a giggle, or childishly chastising his audience if they were on their mobile phones (managers usually have to see to their emails on the go) or even if arriving late. They should have known better, but he came across as foolish and pathetic to say the least.