Former New Straits Times group editor Mustapha Kamil has ridiculed Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak's mid-air chocolate feast.

In a Facebook posting yesterday, he included Najib's statement on the matter into a list of selected quotes by world leaders, which featured the likes of Winston Churchill, Genghis Khan, Margaret Thatcher, Ho Chi Minh, Napolean Bonaparte, Emperor Saladdin, General George Patton and Mahatma Gandhi.

The list of 10 quotes started with former US president John F Kennedy's “ And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”

And the list ended with Najib's, “I had to get onto a helicopter and I ate all the chocolates in the helicopter.”

The prime minister had mentioned this incident during a special dinner with armed forces and police officers in Kuala Lumpur last Friday.

"I want to share a story from last year when I was at the Penrinssen army camp and when the armed forces chief and the defence minister (Hishammuddin Hussein) said they regretted not providing me lunch.

"(After that) I had to get onto a helicopter and I ate all the chocolates in the helicopter," he added.

Najib then joked that last night's dinner had more than made up for the incident at Penrissen camp.

Mustapha, who quit NST in April 2016, has often been critical of the current administration.

In an open letter posted on his Facebook account on May 31, the former top editor said he quit the Umno-linked newspaper as a result of soul-searching after Wall Street Journal broke the 1MDB scandal in 2015.

"I had weighed the situation for as long as I could but when an American newspaper, headquartered somewhere in Lower Manhattan in New York, wrote a story that got nominated for the coveted Pulitzer Prize, about an issue that happened right under my nose, I began to seriously search my conscience and asked myself why I was in journalism in the first place," he had said.