Dom Mintoff

Dom Mintoff is 89 years old today. When former British PrimeMinister Ted Heath died three weeks ago of pneumonia, Mr Mintoff, just one month younger than Mr Heath, was on his way (once again) to recovering from similar symptoms. Being far more health conscious, Mr Mintoff's chances of recovery were always going to be better than those of his early 70s British counterpart. Dom Mintoff, born August 1916, was Prime Minister of Malta under British colonial rule, between 1955 and 1958, and then for another 13 years after independence, between 1971 and 1984. In the August 2004 edition of British magazine The Oldie, FT journalist Godfrey Grima wrote a critical biographical piece on the former socialist PrimeMinister. His personal judgement is expressed with strong value laden terms, which is not surprising, given that in the eighties, Grima was once 'hauled in front of Parliament charged with breach of privilege' after writing a piece for the Financial Times criticising a law that forced the Maltese to repatriate their investments from abroad. That story inspired Maltese author Oliver Friggieri to write his controversial anti establishment novel Fil-Parlament ma jikbrux Fjuri in 1986. Grima's article about Dom Mintoff, part of the 'Still with us' series of the Oldie, is not available online but, courtesy of Grima, I reproduce here some excerpts with added hyperlinks:

He was, and remains a man of intriguing contradictions, a product of Oxford and a friend of Labour Party radicals like Bessie Braddock, Fenner Brockway and Richard Crossman. But it was Lord Louis Mountbatten who did most to advance his career. Mintoff's father, a seaman cook, ran the pantry at Castille Palace in Valletta, where Mountabatten, then Flag Officer heading NATO's Mediterranean fleet had his office. In the summer, Mintoff senior took his teenage son to help in the pantry. He saw no danger in sending young Dom to serve Mountbatten his cups of tea.

The experience proved profitable for Mintoff junior. He not only won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford later, but Mountbatten, according to historians, promoted a scheme which Mintoff championed for Malta to seek full integration with Britain, a political initiative that split the island right down the middle. The project was eventually abandoned as unworkable, turning Dom against Britain for years..

Mintoff met his future wife, Moira de Vere Bentinck, daughter of an aristocratic British colonel, while studying mathematics at Oxford. On his return to wartorn Malta following a stint working as an architect in Britain, he lost no time as a Labour minister in nailing his colours to the mast, first by locking horns with Britain over demands for Marshall aid, then by wresting the party leadership from Sir Paul Boffa. He was hardly ever out of the news after that..

But he was an excellent negotiator. He walked away from his discussions with Britain and NATO over bases with almost five times as much as Malta had been paid previously. He convinced the Chinese to build him a number of costly infrastructural projects for free and got Gaddafi to act as his banker when state funds were low, while Arabs supplied him with low priced oil. By the time he left power the island's national coffers were stacked to the rafters with funds.

In 1983 rising popular dissent forced him to quit the premiership after 13 years. He could never stomach his successor-but-one, Alfred Sant who in 1996 propelled the Malta Labour Party into power with a single seat majority. Mintoff made sure that victory would be short-lived. Two years later he voted with the opposition, bringing the government down..

Mintoff remains a health freak who still swims for an hour in the sea every day of the year, drinks ginseng and is occasionally seen by Chinese doctors. A foreign ambassador who recently saw him at his countryside retreat was surprised to find him with so much fire in his belly still - except that, he added, the man now lives in the stratosphere.

The God that failed - edited by Richard Crossman

The message of Hiroshima - Today , the world commemorates 60 years since the atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima - the world's first nuclear attack. At 8:15 on the morning of August 6th, 1945, a U.S. military plane dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. It was followed 3 days later by another on the city of Nagasaki. At least 100,000 people were killed and it helped bring an end to the U.S.-Japanese war.