Unsurprisingly, the press has been aflame with debate on Mintoff’s merits and achievements of his long, turbulent life. As the discussion now inevitably shifts to deliberations on his legacy, it is well worth keeping in mind that Mintoff and Malta did not live in isolation; global events forcibly shaped both the personality and policies of our magnetic, larger-than-life prime minister.

Mintoff’s era, the 1960s, was synonymous with radical, new, subversive events and trends that continued to develop into the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s. It was one of unprecedented change precipitated by a world war that saw the global order of colonial might and the standard economic and social model for centuries disintegrate in the space of half a generation − in the blink of an ‘historic eye’.

It is therefore not surprising that such a cataclysmic event created a void around the world that drove men of great capabilities, skill, courage and determination to create a different new world order. Just look at his contemporaries. China had the god-like Mao Zhe Dong, Yugoslavia its sly Tito, Singapore its skilfully determined Lee Kuan Yew, the ruthless Khrushchev and Brezhnev in Russia and the indefatigable Castro in Cuba. Even Imperial France needed a blindly driven, quasi-dictatorial Charles de Gaulle to restore the dignity of that once-powerful imperial nation. In Africa, 32 countries gained independence from their European colonial rulers during Mintoff’s era. Most ended with strong men: Selassie, Gaddafi, Boumidienne, Nyerere, Bourgiba, Nasser, Obote, Amin. It is hardly surprising then that Mintoff would later look south for assistance and camaraderie when his love affair with Britain was over.

This was an era that created and seemed to thrive on bigger-than-life men (yes, they were all men) with powerful egos. ‘Political correctness’ was half a century away. This was not a period for polite dialogues and exchanges. It was an urgent period of loud revolutionaries who spoke their minds, had the desire to bend the world to their will, the audacity to attempt to do so and electorates that seemed willing to let them try.

So Malta, often the exception was, perhaps for once, no different to many.

We also had our own revolutionary.

Ours came with a colour and ego that reflected his irascible Mediterranean character and southern home. His modest stature belied his firebrand style, his moving rhetoric and his wondrous ability to raise the masses from their Mediterranean slumber. Every good revolutionary also had a trademark visual cue and, while it doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as easily as the ‘Chairman Mao Suit’ or the ‘Churchill Cigar’, the ‘Mintoff Buckle’, was nonetheless as real and in-your-face as the man himself.

Those that love him point to his achievements of introducing to Malta a hitherto unimaginable, level of social reform that provided a ‘safety net’ to Malta’s poor. This was truly pioneering work at a time when Malta, never wealthy, was still recovering from the devastation and deprivations of war. Recall that, in Britain itself, National Insurance was only introduced in 1911 despite the fact that the UK had unquestionably been the wealthiest nation in the world for most of the previous century. That this safety net applied to all Maltese seems to be forgotten by his detractors who, understandably, argue that Malta could not afford it and that, besides, it was his predecessor, the kindly Boffa (‘the doctor of the poor’) who introduced them. Anyway, they add, its introduction was inevitable, it would have happened in time no matter who was in power. Probably true, but it did, nonetheless, happen on Mintoff’s watch and he did actively champion it through.

Mintoff’s detractors also point to his unholy fights with the Church, an institution which, forgive the pun, remains sacred to the Maltese to this day − despite the multiple evidence of its protracted history of wrongdoing around the world and for which it is, only now, paying dearly. That this institution acted as a quasi-secret second government in parallel with the democratically elected one, that it spoke a language (Latin) that virtually no one understood, that it indulged in questionable medieval practices designed to extract money from poor, uneducated, terrified believers (payment for indulgences, deathbed wills recast in favour of the Church by unscrupulous priests) seems to be lost on Mintoff’s critics. That Mintoff had the gall to go up against such a powerful institution that the woefully superstitious Maltese still held in awe, is surely an indication of the mettle of the man.

There is a well known, perhaps apocryphal story, that Mintoff, as a child, was denied admission to Castille to see his father who worked there as a cook. Most children would have accepted that and walked away. But not Mintoff. They say that the incident so incensed him that it would form the start of a life-long struggle against the hegemony of imperial powers and trigger his latent ego.

Mintoff did indeed struggle on behalf of Maltese to secure a safe place for Malta in the terrible storms that ensued after the collapse of the imperial model. First, by wanting to graft Malta onto the Imperial Mother through integration with her then, as would a hurt, spurned child, by renouncing anything to do with Britain once his request was denied. His detractors marvel at his inability to see that integration with Britain was doomed from the outset. Why on earth would the UK want to set such a precedent and open the path to problems of unimaginable proportions should say, an India, also make such a request?

And so Mintoff, with his famously gigantic ego now fully matured and painfully bruised, looked for help elsewhere and in places that seemed designed to make the unkind, democratic former Colonial Mother take note: Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, Ceausescu’s Romania, Castro’s Cuba, Mao’s China, Gaddafi’s Libya.

To be sure, this cutting of the economic umbilical chord was an existential threat that would have broken a lesser man. Across the world in Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, facing a similar peril, hung his political hat and his country’s economic future on integration with Malaya. When this fell apart in 1964, the shock was so great and the outlook for his young nation so bleak, that this profoundly driven and capable man was famously seen crying on television as he announced it to his stunned compatriots.

That Malta benefited from Mintoff is without doubt. That the net result of this experimental period is generally positive, however, is also rightfully questioned.

Who can, after all, forget the decade of a collapsing infrastructure that led to regular blackouts of electricity, of daily interruption to water supplies, of potholes in roads, of the terrible shortages of every conceivable item as Mintoff’s exploration of alien economic models saw Malta teetering on the brink of bankruptcy? 

Who can forget that in his time the proudly independent Maltese were compelled to travel overseas on a new, bright-green passport that had an uncanny resemblance to the now defunct Gaddafi Little Green Book. That it had Arabic writing on it did little to assuage suspicions of an apprehensive Europe mystified by Mintoff’s proclamations of friendship with a pariah state. European Maltese were slapped with humiliating visa restrictions by several European countries once considered a natural part of our ancestry.

It is almost incredulous now, and surely unbelievable to Malta’s Internet generation, to recall that for the better part of Mintoff’s leadership Maltese could only buy one brand of chocolate and one brand of black and white TV. If it is laughable now to recall that for almost a decade it became the norm for Maltese to travel overseas with empty luggage in order to bring back all sorts of goods unavailable here (and to pay customs officers bribes on their return), it is far less laughable to recall the far more sinister and dangerous culture that insidiously crept into Maltese society on Mintoff’s watch.

If intolerance for imperial arrogance was a feature of Mintoff and indeed of the proud Maltese, it is undeniable that a culture of intolerance of Maltese between Maltese grew in Mintoff’s period. His detractors would argue that he gave this terrible child its birth, that he nurtured it and which in the end he used for his own egotistical purposes.

Thuggery and hooliganism became a depressing, dreadful background to life in Malta in Mintoff’s era. Bombings, beating up of students and anyone expressing an opposing opinion, attacks on every PN club on the island as well as the Law Courts and even on the wife of the Leader of the Opposition in front of her own children, are all documented facts of life in the 70s.

Contempt for the rule of law and the professional class also became an unhappy trademark of Mintoff’s time, as did a culture of institutionalised bribery and corruption hitherto unknown in Malta on such an endemic and institutionalised scale.

It is irrefutable that events that took place in Mintoff’s era sit uncomfortably with claims that Mintoff’s legacy is an overwhelmingly positive one: suspension of the Constitutional Court; a police commissioner much later found guilty of homicide, gerrymandering and electoral fraud; blatant corruption and resorting to bribery for many basic services (importation licences, installation of telephone lines, connection to electricity), expropriations without compensation, attacking and gutting The Times’ building. Fights with architects, doctors, nurses, bankers, entrepreneurs and the professional class that led to a brain drain we are only beginning to recover from now.

These all happened, undeniably, on Mintoff’s watch. They tarnish his legacy with an introduction of confrontational politics that is, regrettably, still very much in evidence to this day.

So, the man is gone. With an incongruity not unbefitting the colour of the man and his era and of which he was blissfully unaware: clutching a rosary bead in a religious state send-off organised in impeccable style by the former political enemies he came so close to destroying.

“Why on earth would those hypocritical Nationalists offer him a State Funeral?” his detractors ask.

“Because they have an eye to their own send-off,” retorts the sceptic.

I have a different theory.

Perhaps that state funeral, in this politically correct era of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, was in fact organised to lay the turbulent, wretchedly divisive Mintoff era to rest.

If so, I believe Malta will be all the better for it.

Claude Calleja

NAXXAR