Paul Boffa, Malta’s First Labour Prime Minister
SKS pp 295
ISBN: 978-99932-17-20-6 (paperback)
Desmond Zammit Marmarà is right: history has not been too kind to Paul Boffa, but then history is littered with examples of political figures who have not been given their due either in their lifetime and, even more so, after their death.
...Boffa firmly believed that his party’s ideas were far better and more advantageous to the working class than those of Strickland and Enrico Mizzi put together- Victor Aquilina
In the case of Boffa, his work is generally eclipsed by that of Dom Mintoff, the man who brought him down as Labour Party leader.
It is Mintoff who is usually credited with having engineered Labour’s golden era.
But Mr Zammit Marmarà feels, quite justifiably, that, without diminishing Mintoff’s significant role and place in history, historians are also duty bound to point out that it was Boffa who had paved the way for Labour’s achievements.
Indeed, one can go a bit further and say that Boffa had only joined Gerald Strickland in the “compact” government because, in Boffa’s own words, “we wanted him to do something good for the workers”.
However, Boffa firmly believed that his party’s ideas were far better and more advantageous to the working class than those of Strickland and Enrico Mizzi put together.
Boffa’s name is, of course, directly linked to the split in the Labour Party in 1949 over the withdrawal of an ultimatum to Britain over planned discharges from the dockyard and a claim for a share of Marshall Aid.
However, although Boffa’s clash with Mintoff and the impact this had had on the Labour movement of the time, make up the most dramatic chapter in Boffa’s life and times, there is more in his lifetime that deserves to be explored and known.
In his book Paul Boffa, Malta’s First Prime Minister, now published in English as translated by Anne Schranz, Mr Zammit Marmarà brings out the qualities that endeared Boffa to the working class.
And he paints a good picture of the man as he manoeuvred his way through the various phases of his career as a family doctor and politician.
Boffa’s story is also shared, as it were, by the political grandees of the time, all having different traits and characters. The characters of Boffa, Enrico Mizzi and of George Borg Olivier were tame next to that of two other dominant politicians, Strickland and Mintoff.
Indeed, there could have hardly been a sharper contrast in many respects.
Strickland’s and Mintoff’s characters were domineering, aggressive, even ruthless and brash at times.
Boffa’s was quite the opposite, and Borg Olivier’s, well, his was probably the epitome of the old-world gentleman politician.
Boffa’s world was distant from that which Strickland inhabited, seeped in aristocratic roots and embedded in imperial and colonial mores and experience.
Boffa did not have Mintoff’s overbearing airs either. With a Flag cigarette hanging out of his mouth, Boffa was the working-class hero, unassuming and cautious to the extreme.
Through his work as a family doctor, he came face to face with the harsh reality of the life of the ordinary worker and sought to uplift the working class’s spirit and living standard through education and improved conditions and social services.
The 1920s and 1930s may have been politically submerged in endless bickering over language. But running deep in all the political currents was an unbounded urge for the island to struggle out of its colonial shell, as graphically epitomised by the emblem Labour adopted – the torch, signifying, among things, progress and light – and, also, by the name of three of Strickland’s newspapers, Progress, Xemx and Il-Berqa.
These embodied, more or less, the same manifestation of political thought, essentially shaped by a growing and a more widespread aspiration for greater political rights and material progress.
Mr Zammit Marmarà traces Boffa’s work on the road to reconstruction after the war; the roots of his parting of the ways with Mintoff, one of the saddest chapters in the history of the Labour movement; their differences; their different brands of socialism; and, after the split in 1949, Boffa’s daring decision (at least in the eyes of Labour supporters) for his Malta Workers’ Party to join the Nationalist Party in coalition governments, a move considered as a betrayal of Labour’s cause and one that cost Boffa dearly.
He goes into Boffa’s work to promote the Maltese language, not purely for academic reasons but more because it was the people’s “flag and icon of identity”.
Well put. In later years, Boffa was accused of changing his attitude, of turning moderate and of getting too friendly with the Church when he had fought with Strickland against the Church’s interference in politics at the time of the “compact” government.
When recounting briefly the situation before the 1932 elections, Mr Zammit Marmarà remarks that, unlike Strickland, Boffa never apologised to the Church, “which brought him a lot of respect since it showed his conviction that he had not been at fault”.
This may need clarification. Strickland had only apologised for words said in the heat of the argument. He did not retract his stand against the Church’s interference in politics, a matter that is generally overlooked.
There is another point. In the account leading to the 1927 election, mention is made of the fact that the Nationalists had resorted to underhand tactics by making use of Terinu (Ettore Bone) “who tried to spread the rumour that Strickland was a Freemason”. The Nationalists of the time had not only tried but they had very well succeeded in spreading the rumour by distributing, on the eve of the election, a leaflet showing Strickland as a Freemason.
Terinu’s false affidavit had been sworn at the official residence of the Prime Minister, Auberge d’Aragon, in the presence of ministers.
Mr Zammit Marmarà’s book in Maltese, published in 2010, suffers in translation, but both in its original, in Maltese, and in its English translation, it is a good introduction to the life of politician who does deserve to be studied in greater depth.