Victor Ragonesi, key negotiator in 1964 independence talks, has died at 101

Victor Ragonesi, personal assistant of Prime Minister Gorg Borg Olivier and a key player in Malta’s independence negotiations with Britain, has died aged 101.

Ragonesi became Borg Olivier’s assistant after the 1962 general election, which the Nationalist Party won on the ticket of seeking Malta’s independence.

Ragonesi shuttled between London and Auberge d’Aragon (where the Office of the Prime Minister was situated), frequently travelling for talks with the British, and Commonwealth nations like India and Kenya, sharing their best advice on dealing with the old colonial master.

Victor Ragonesi interviewed in 2005

He never slept more than four hours, his eldest daughter Mariella Cassar recalled in comments to MaltaToday last year when Ragonesi celebrated his 100th birthday in the same year Malta commemorated 60 years of independence.

“After the 1962 election, he became Borg Olivier’s personal assistant. He’d leave home at 6am, come back for lunch and a siesta till 4pm, and then return at midnight,” Mariella had said.

And while Gorg Borg Olivier is crowned as the father of Maltese independence, few will doubt the key support Ragonesi contributed to the Nationalist premier’s mission at the time.

He was born on 7 September 1924 in a Valletta family of Nationalist stock, friends of PN leaders Enrico Mizzi and Ugo Mifsud, and firmly in the stream of Italophiles that defined pre-war Malta. He would later become a speechwriter for the PN’s leader after the return of Mizzi from internment in Uganda.

Ragonesi, a lawyer by profession, became general secretary of the PN by 1955, a period when the party opposed then Prime Minister Dom Mintoff’s plan to seek integration with Britain. The PN had boycotted the integration referendum. By 1958, the Labour Party, which had resigned from government amid rioting, and the Nationalist Party, had set course for an independent Malta.

Victor Ragonesi became PN secretary general by 1955

After the 1962 election, Ragonesi participated in all the negotiations on the road to independence, working with Professor J.J. Cremona on the drafting of the Constitution.

“We wanted the British and NATO to retain Malta as a base,” Ragonesi said in a Campus FM interview in the 2000s. “It was a matter of security for us, to be able to attract foreign investment, with no danger that some other country could simply grab us, and investors losing all they had invested. We told the British: you have been exploiting us for the past 164 years, so you have to pay for the base. We concluded the financial agreement and for 10 years they offered us £51 million.”

By 1966, Ragonesi would leave his position—a family of four children required a different kind of attention. His daughter Mariella had told MaltaToday: “His bark was worse than his bite. Most people who knew him had some trepidation around him, but I didn’t.”

Ragonesi was married to the late Maria Concetta Ragonesi nee Casolani and they had four children: Mariella Cassar, Anne Argent, Rodolfo Ragonesi and Isabelle Raongesi.