He’s served heads of state and celebrities, including the Queen, Hilary Clinton and David Beckham, but Maltese-born Miguel Spiteri is now serving the Huddersfield public.

At only 25-years-of-age he’s been appointed manager of Kirkheaton village pub The Beaumont Arms and is a partner in a business that owns six public houses in the Huddersfield area.

And while his life in Yorkshire is less glamorous than the days when he served at functions for the office of the Prime Minister in Malta, Miguel says he’s more than happy to be putting down roots in rural Northern England.

Miguel might still be in his twenties but he can already look back on a career that has taken him from Malta’s four star hotels to Scotland’s famous Crieff Hydro and then into pub management in West Yorkshire. He’s climbed the rungs of the hospitality industry from waiter and washer-upper to taking charge of his own establishment. And along the way he’s had experiences that many in his profession can only dream of.

A highlight of his teenage years was working for one of the island’s major catering companies at a banquet attended by the Queen when Malta hosted the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in 2005 (the event is returning to Malta in November this year). “I’ve had some amazing experiences,” said Miguel, “at the time I didn’t even think about it but when I look back I realise how fortunate I was.” He regularly worked at black tie dinner events, exclusive weddings and state functions.

Miguel, who studied catering and hospitality to diploma level in Malta after leaving school at 16, spent several months on work placement in Italy and a year at Crieff Hydro during his studies. It whetted his appetite for travel and gave him management ambitions.

“I’m fortunate in that I haven’t got anything to tie me down and I’ve been able to move around for my work,” he says. “It’s meant that I could take opportunities when they were offered to me. I don’t believe in luck, I think you make your own luck and you have to make sacrifices for what you want.”

Miguel Spiteri at The Beaumont Arms, Kirkheaton, Huddersfield.

Because he was born and raised in Malta, Miguel speaks English fluently and also has a good grasp of Italian, French and German. Like many young people in Malta he started working in hotels as a way to earn pocket money while studying. On the holiday destination island many aspire to jobs in hotel management and hospitality work has a much higher status than it does in the UK. “I grew up waiting tables,” he says, “in Malta people look up to people in the hospitality business. One of the highest paid jobs is being a manager of a hotel. But to get further I had to leave Malta. When someone gets to manage a hotel there they stay in the job for 20 or 30 years, making it difficult for younger people to get into management.”

To improve his chances Miguel decided that after his studies he would return to the UK. He approached Crieff Hydro, who welcomed him back with a role as banqueting and events assistant manager and enrolled him on a management development programme. (His face still appears on the company’s website).

Miguel says he will always be grateful for the superb training he received in Crieff: “They covered everything from personal grooming to how to deal with customer complaints and avoid using language that would aggravate a situation.” The experience made such an impression on him that he’s now a firm believer in how staff training can turn a business around.

“Staff training is more than critical, it’s fundamental,” he says, “and not just for customer service but also for financial reasons, to reduce wastage in the business.”

But after working in a hotel Miguel says the traditional British pub industry beckoned and he found a job as assistant manager at the Black Horse in Clifton, an establishment famed for its fine dining. He then moved to the Sands House in Crosland Moor to oversee a refurbishment (it’s part of the same group as the Beaumont Arms) and in January this year arrived at the newly-refurbished Beaumont Arms as a business partner managing a full-time staff of nine.

With pub closures running at an all-time high (among businesses for sale pubs rank as third highest) Manuel knew that he would need all of his management skills and experience. But he’s quietly confident he’s got a winning formula. “We are doing very well for ourselves at the moment,” he explained, “we have a formula for reviving pubs.”

“It’s about attention to detail. We sit down as business partners every week to discuss the little things. A lot of landlords took the pub industry for granted and when that happens standards are going to go down and people notice the small things; things like cleanliness, flowers on the tables and the way staff are trained. I used to work for a manager who said that if you have a smile on your face people are less likely to complain. Every pub can have good food and good beer but it’s how you present and serve it that makes the difference.”

Miguel also believes he is living proof that with hard work and the right attitude it’s possible to climb from low-paid, entry-level work to management in just a few short years. “There are all sorts of jobs in hospitality and I would be nothing without the people washing my dishes, waiting tables and emptying my bins,” he says. “That’s how I started. You can’t be running your own restaurant unless you’ve done these jobs. But in this country a lot of people don’t want to start at the bottom with the menial work. There are jobs in the hospitality industry but do they want to do them?”