If one seriously wishes to understand a particular period of history one cannot do better than read a diary of some personality who was intimately involved in that period. Such a diary is that of Governor Sir Charles Bonham-Carter covering events from 1936 to 1940 which was published some years ago as edited by John Manduca.
Had Mintoff been 40 years younger I wonder what the exigencies of our own time would have prompted him to be like- Kenneth Zammit Tabona
What is extraordinary and somewhat unusual is the close relationship Bonham-Carter had with Malta and the Maltese. His observations are wise, deeply insightful, concise and not without a twinge of humour. Here is the private diary of a man who represented the greatest power on earth at the time, the British Empire.
On November 21, 1938, Bonham-Carter presided at a meeting of the selection committee for Rhodes Scholarships.
There were three candidates, a certain Bartolo who, oddly enough, remains unidentified, John Cremona, later Attorney General and Chief Justice, and Dominic Mintoff. Bonham-Carter describes Mintoff as “a 22-year-old engineering student at University just finishing his time, able, likely, the Rector said, to get a First at Oxford, a really strong character with plenty of personality and likely to take an interest in the government of his country later on". Mintoff was chosen as being "more mature and more likely to make his mark at Oxford”.
What a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. While watching the six-hour cortege from Tarxien to Valletta last Thursday I kept harking back to periods in my life when Mintoff’s decisions, the result of far more than a passing “interest in the government of his country”, affected my own life and that of those around me far more devastatingly and directly than any prime ministerial decision since and far more radically than Governor Bonham-Carter could have ever imagined.
Enough has been written about Mintoff in the past week; emotional epitaphs and florid eulogies which I think would have vastly amused him, for the only thing that one simply cannot dispute about the man is that he was an enigma in every sense of the word to the very end.
I never knew Mintoff first hand; that was quite out of the question as I was the wrong age, belonging to the wrong class and type, professing different ideologies and, all in all, simply unsuitable if not incompatible. Had he been 40 years younger I wonder what the exigencies of our own time would have prompted him to be like.
The Mintoff I knew was the public persona who lauded and glorified the working class, the blue collared ones in particular for reasons best known to him and who had an agenda to get even with all those entities and personalities that had opposed his bid for integration in the 1950s.
And yet, contrary to popular belief, his English was impeccable and he was quite at home with the aristocracy and plutocracy of his day. He actually married an aristocrat and two of his closest friends and supporters are themselves rampollini of our local aristocracy.
Yes, Mintoff’s life was peppered with contradictions and U-turns, the latest being that of 1998 when he felt, rightly or wrongly, that the livelihood of the worker was being jeopardised by Alfred Sant’s policies. Sant, faced with this sort of opposition in his one-seat majority government, called an election which returned the PN to power and unwittingly reopened the door to EU membership.
I still think, however, that the greatest U-turn in Mintoff’s career was the swing from integration to being a republic. Nothing could be more diametrically opposed.
I sometimes wonder what Malta would have been like had we become an integral part of the UK with the same status as Scotland, Ireland and Wales. We would have been more British than the British which is why I suppose so many PCP supporters, after the death of Lord Strickland in 1940, transferred their allegiance to the Labour Party and Mintoff in particular.
This was evident even in 1971, after the battle for integration was lost and the battle for independence was won. By then it was only one short step to the removal of the Queen as our head of state, as she still then was, and the establishment of a republic. Had Malta opted to be integrated and had Britain accepted this integration the history of Malta would have been vastly different. One would imagine that the nationalist opposition would have never taken integration lying down and one shudders to think what anathemas Archbishop Michael Gonzi would have hurled in the manner of Pius IX who upon Italian unification excommunicated the new King of Italy and his successors while declaring papal infallibility. Who knows what the Royal Borough of Malta would have been like in 2012?
Who reads Don Camillo today? In my childhood, communism was considered to be a very real threat to our way of life and, like all good Jesuit-trained boys of my generation, I firmly believed that Capital C communism was an ideology that was poles apart from what I was brought up to be and believe in. Mintoff identified with this sort of communism in his foreign policies which of course terrified all those who, brought up in the shadow of Guareschi’s “little world”, thought that he would be joining the Soviet bloc before we knew it. Mintoff and Gonzi were a deadly serious version of Peppone and Don Camillo!
It will take a very long time to sort out the impact Mintoff has had on our history as no other figure in it has evoked such divergent emotions. To take a detached view of his controversial policies and his absolutist actions will probably require another couple of generations to pass, and yet, if Voltaire will forgive me, I feel at this juncture that had Mintoff not existed it would have been necessary to invent him.