The fall from grace of an administrative elite : the administrative class of the Malta Civil Service and the transfer of power : April 1958 to September 1964

Abstract

The creation of the State of Malta in 1962 constituted a turning point in the uneasy, occasionally turbulent relationship between administrative and political elites throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This study outlines the concerns that exercised Malta’s administrative elite as plans were laid for the transfer of power from British to Maltese ministers under the Interim Constitution (1959) and the Blood Constitution (1961). It examines the role played by the Head of the Civil Service in the attempt to forge an ethic of political neutrality for the civil service of a polity deeply divided by partisan loyalties, as well as the claims and campaigns of the Society of Administrative and Executive Civil Servants in response to challenges to the status hierarchy arising from other professions in government. The displacement of the administrative class from a position of constitutional primacy, and the erosion of its status among the professions employed by government are indubitably linked. The fate of the administrative elite that ‘fell from grace’ as Malta attained statehood signalled the passing of the Island’s traditional order.