So Dom Mintoff was in love with John Attard Montalto – what a story
And eulogies of praise are being written and spoken to this. If these are our heroes, then what are we?
My old neighbour from Milner Street, John Attard Montalto, has had this piece published in The Times. He shouldn’t have written it, though it is written well as always with John, because it reads like a homo-erotic love story and that’s ill-advised given that Mintoff was bisexual.
Yes, it was nothing but friendship on John’s part, and admiration for a much older political hero, but as for the rest, it reads like a love story, and not an account of friendship between two men.
Friendship between two men four decades apart in age is unusual enough.
You made a mistake there, John.
As for the press, there’s a story right there which they should be following up: what’s this about Mintoff sending John Attard Montalto to see the archbishop and put in an offer for the Curia building, to convert it into the Labour HQ?
It’s a big story – so why has it been left to drop?
It shows just what sort of a man Mintoff was: the sort who got his kicks by turning the Archbishop’s headquarters into the Labour Party headquarters. Anyway, read this piece of homo-erotica (and no, John, this is not a reference to your behaviour but to Mintoff’s) if you haven’t done so already.
———
By John Attard Montalto
I was already 34 when I met Dom Mintoff. He was 71, no longer leader of the Malta Labour Party or Prime Minister. In a single week in 1987, a friendship was sealed.
It was after the general election, which Labour lost. I had managed to be elected but my spirits were low.
Our leader, Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, was struck by serious illness and out of action. At the then party headquarters in Cospicua, Mintoff met the parliamentarians, greeting each one individually.
He told me, “I wouldn’t have bet five liri on your being elected!” I replied with a smile that could mean many things. His nickname for me – he never called me John – became “Smiles” but that came later.
A short while later he addressed a mass meeting in Fgura. The unparalleled orator, who was able to make his listeners laugh and cry. I was there. Driving home, on a whim I made a detour to Tarxien and rang his doorbell.
A growling voice asked who it was. “Montalto!” In very colourful language he asked me what I wanted. Then I heard the door open. On the threshold, a backlit silhouette, Mintoff stood in his bathing trunks, arms akimbo. “This had better be urgent!”
My words tumbled out. I just wanted to thank him. We were broken and he was making us whole again. He was pleased. He called his wife (“Babs!”) and demanded I repeat what I had just said in English. After which, he invited me in for supper.
He asked me if I liked to swim and walk. The next day we went on our first swimming trip. On that occasion, he warned me that I had to be careful. If I were to become his friend, I would become a political target. “I’ve always wanted to be your friend,” I said. “I choose friendship.”
From that point, and for the next 16 years or so, I met him at least once a week (except during my 22-month stint as minister). We had a special rapport that, perhaps, can only exist when two men are almost 40 years apart in age and complete opposites in several respects.
He would often ask me to accompany him on trips abroad. I made him laugh, lent a non-judgmental ear to some of his confidential reminiscences, and he enjoyed grumbling that he had to take care of me when it should have been the opposite.
I became his lawyer. When several senior lawyers, sympathetic to his cause, advised that his Delimara case against the government was unwinnable, I disagreed and told him that I had found a legal precedent in Belgium. And we did win.
Somehow, I also became an emissary for his “missions impossible”. Some were tense but others, like the time he sent me to Archbishop Joseph Mercieca with an offer to buy the Curia building in Floriana (the plan was to convert it into a new Labour headquarters and, yes, he did gather the funds), make me chuckle helplessly till today.
In 1996, when I was facing a difficult re-election campaign, he imposed himself as my canvasser. He came down to my district and over two days conducted a surgical campaign on my behalf. It did wonders.
Mintoff has often been described as tight-fisted but my own experience was the opposite. For my 35th birthday, he invited me to Delimara, secretly invited my parents, wore a bright checked shirt I had given him, sang “Happy Birthday” and gave me a valuable set of etchings which Aldo Moro had given him. I had to be careful in saying that I liked something he had, since more often than not he would insist on giving it to me.
Our relationship had special rules. Mintoff didn’t like being touched but he let me hug and kiss him on both cheeks each time we met. He almost expected it. Once, when he bit my head off for a careless remark I made, he noticed I had lost my appetite. He gave me a squeeze, saying, “If I can’t get angry with those I love, who can I get angry with?”
I hesitate to describe our relationship as that between an uncle and nephew. It may be taken to be presumptuous. I would be happy to describe our odd couple as something only Walt Disney could invent: the unlikely, mutually protective friendship between two very different animals, an old lion king called “Perit” and an oversize cub called “Smiles”.
That’s the kind of figure we must have cut on a Parisian trip. Despite having been there several times, he had never managed to visit the major sights. I was happy to show him around and joke that he was getting glances from Parisian women. He told me what I could do with my jokes but he also came to my room in the mornings, when my head was still heavy with sleep, to share his special honeyed, milky tea from his thermos (where he recounted that the famous thermos dated back to the 1950s, when a serious attempt to poison him was made).
My enduring memory is from a Tunisia trip. He had insisted I learn how to windsurf. I was hopeless and drifted around a mile out and couldn’t get back. A strong swimmer even in his 70s, he dived into the sea, caught up and hauled me in. Growling, of course, because he loved me.
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Pass the tissues. I haven’t cried like this since ‘Brokeback Mountain.
Indeed, very Brokeback Mountain. How does this guy not realize how this reads?
I cringed all the way through it.
where’s the happily ever after ending?
What a story indeed. How did I miss this?
It reads like the second chapter of Baxxter’s Fifty Shades of Red, where Mintoff takes the part of Byson and John Attard Montalto plays the role of the intern.
There you go Baxxter, you can start on Chapter 3.
Life imitating art, eh?
“Based on a true story.”
God… Even better than the blogs on gaydar or dads4lads.com
I don’t think JAM is as innocent as you portray him.
There’s a strong element of homo-eroticism in his tone.
Tghid gejja xi storja bhal ta’ Lucio Dalla?
Ha naraw ikunx hemm xi claims fuq il-wirt ta’ Mintoff…
It looks like Karmenu Vella has his own love story to tell. Shame he’s not able to write it.
The sale of the Curia story has been around for a couple of days. I actually think that Attard Montalto mentioned it agian to re-confirm it because it was dismissed as a misunderstanding by officials of the MLP.
On the other hand, it might also be the case that Mintoff was poking fun at JAM, sending him on such absurd missions. It could be he was leading him on his insane quest to become leader of the Party.
Put yourselves in JAM’s shoes. Mintoff trusts you with these incredible missions (such as convincing the Curia to sell its own HQ to the MLP, for it to transfer its HQ there! – just imagine that) and you start believing you really are Mintoff’s most trusted man. And therefore heir-apparent.
But at the same time, Mintoff is playing precisely the same game with others, such as that luminary, AST. AST too used to be Mintoff’s emissary on absurd missions – only that he was officially so, as Foreign Minister. (AST still defines himself, on his business cards, as Former Foreign Minister… casting light on the psychology of the game.)
And possibly with other big-ego, small-brain highly ambitious personages.
Indeed, both AST and JAM were hated by Sant because he saw in them rivals for his seat – unlike George Abela, however, these two were out-of-touch, deluded rivals.
Speaking of whom … let us now analyse George Abela – who also must have been one of Mintoff’s big-ego-ed victims. When Abela decided to run for Leader, Mintoff attended Abela’s meetings, a clear sign that we may safely speculate that Mintoff was probably fomenting Abela’s ambitions too.
It all boils down to a divide and rule strategy. By creating many rivals for Sant, Mintoff must have calculated Sant would run to him for shelter.
Instead, Sant did the opposite. It was only natural, then, that the whole structure should collapse. Mintoff built his strategy on the premise that Sant would avoid the collapse (as any sane person would do). Mintoff did not take into consideration (in his Nash equilibrium game) that perhaps Sant is not totally sane (as Clemmer has shown in his Sant vs. Sant).
Can you give us a clue what you’re on?
It may be true that Mintoff had thought that Sant would back down in Mintoff’s high stakes “negotiation” (or “equilibrium game”) with Sant (while Sant held the country hostage to his vision of keeping Malta out of the EU, except on his “ideal” terms).
Two such strong-willed persons in opposition to each other was certainly a dramatic confrontation, when more than a yacht marina was at stake.
In my book, Alfred Sant Explained: In-Novella ta’ Malta Fil-Mediterran (2000, in English), I did not make judgments on Sant’s sanity. Sant, certainly, is highly imaginative, as his literature shows, and my caution was that for everyone’s sake Sant should have stuck to literature and stayed out of politics.
In fact, I tried to demonstrate the rationale for his tactics, especially in his use of language as a weapon. Part of my conclusion regarding Sant is that he seems to have been an idealist, who believed in the power of his will to turn his ideas into everyone’s social reality.
Sant’s problem was that he couldn’t get the real world in and out of Malta (and one Dom Mintoff) to accept his ideals, given human freedom and his own limited power conditioned by various votes – in Parliament, EU negotiations, and in successive elections.
JAM confirmed what most suspected of Dom.
Miskina, Moira. A real saint and may she rest in peace.
Evarist was pretty miffed at not being aware of all this, the curia deal I mean.
Mintoff qatt ma ghamel xejn ta’ xejn.
U skond tal-Forum Zaghzagh Laburisti, fis-sebghinijiet Mintoff illiberalizza is-soDOMija u l-omosesswalita.
mur u stahba north pole
If you read homo-eroticism in this dear Daphne you do need to get a life ta! You poor soul sure don’t know anything about friendship!
[Daphne – Sure. That really sounds like male friendship.]
The friendship between men 40 years apart in the fields of politics, sciences etc. where the subject demands mentoring. It is when it is described this way that it becomes disturbing.
JAM is not straight isn’t he, or is it just my impression?
The friendship between men 40 years apart in the fields of politics, sciences etc. where the subject demands mentoring is not that unusual. It is when it is described in this way that it becomes disturbing.
JAM is not straight isn’t he, or is it just my impression?
“He called his wife (“Babs!”) and demanded I repeat what I had just said in English.”
I thought she had left Malta long before ’87, or am I mistaken?
[Daphne – She was persuaded to return, largely, I suppose, because it’s a little difficult to live in England without money.]
She remained penniless in Malta. Poor woman.
“He shouldn’t have written it, though it is written well as always with John, because it reads like a homo-erotic love story and that’s ill-advised given that Mintoff was bisexual.”
Tikber u titgħallem.
Thallihiex tbellaghlek ic-cucati. Tal-anqas, itlobha ricevuta.
Inkella, tikber u tiblieh.
Ara Kevin rega’ lura maghna. Merhba lura, u nispera li l-kliem tieghi jista’ jkun ta’ farag.
Baxxter, il-fatt li maghkom qatt ma kont, ma jiswiex daqs il-fatt li missejtu l-qiegh u komplejtu thaffru.
Nispera li Yana ma tpaxxikomx b’xi rapport ta’ kalunja u malafama.
Mhux ghax ma jisthoqqilkom. Wara kollox, min jallega jrid jipprova, u allegazzjonijiet hawn saru hafna…
Izda l-fantaziji ta’ hmara li tghix go vaska tal-hut qajla tista’ tehodhom bis-serjeta. Ghax dak li, intrinsikament, hu taz-zuffjett, immaginattiv u banali, ma jista’ qatt ikun malafamanti.
Are the words of Mintoff’s acolytes always suspect, Kev?
That makes one wonder whether you featured in the scheme of things. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Maybe you just weren’t to his liking.
Issa sejkkolli nispjegalek il-Malti wkoll? “Rega’ lura maghna” jigifieri “ergajt tfaccajt”.
U “Yana”. First name terms, eh? Is there something we should be told? In any case, jien qatt ma allegajt xejn. Sakemm ma naqghux fil-punt ridikolu li gudizzju morali nsejhulu allegazzjoni.
Gaddafi was bisexual too. What an amazing coincidence.
SO WAS GONZI L-ISQOF SO WHAT DOES THAT TELL YOU, PLEASE GET A LIFE.
It’s sad how the majority of Maltese people “forget” about the horrible things Mintoff did and I am relieved that there are people who have the balls to post controvertial articles such as this.
However sexual orientation has nothing to do with what he did, which means that any reader with a fully functional brain should not give a damn whether he was gay, bi or straight.
[Daphne – Ordinarily, yes. But in this context, no. You’re wrong. What are you saying here – that one of Mintoff’s main men, a senior Labour Party figure, writes a piece for a national newspaper, laden with homo-erotic overtones, about his relationship with the former Labour leader who was 40 years his senior, and we should ignore it? Please grow up and join the real world. To avoid discussion, that piece shouldn’t have been written in the first place. Once it was written and published so prominently, expect discussion. At the risk of repeating myself, this is a democracy.]
Joseph Carmel Chetcuti should be happy to learn this. He now has a “monumental” figure to add to his list of characters for an updated edition of Queer Mediterranean Memories.
“Our leader, Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, was struck by serious illness and out of action”
He was beaten up by Lorry Sant at il-Mancina Headquarters of the MLP.
Is this founded? Or pure hearsay? Now that’s one I never heard before…
If I remember correctly , any gift presented by one Head of Government to another is a gift from one nation to another. These etchings should have been donated to a museum and not kept to be passed on as a present.
Mr Attard Montalto should donate these etchings to the Museum of Fine Arts (unless he has also given them away instead of digging into his opwn pockets.
Sorry to ask, but where is the evidence that he was bisexual? I’m really curious about this.
[Daphne – Oh, you could always give Karmenu Vella a ring. I’m quite sure he’d be happy to tell you.]
IS THIS REALLY THE BEST YOU CAN COME UP WITH?
Does this mean that somebody caught Karm and Dom in flagrante?
According to Raymond, this was one of the many ways in which his brother was misunderstood. “For instance, they say he was a miser. But he gave me this Rolex,” he says as he shakes the cherished gold watch worth thousands of euro on his wrist.
To him the wristwatch symbolises his brother’s generosity, even though he knows it was originally a gift from “some head of state” that Dom found too heavy for his own wrist.
———–
Mintoff has often been described as tight-fisted but my own experience was the opposite. For my 35th birthday, he invited me to Delimara, secretly invited my parents, wore a bright checked shirt I had given him, sang “Happy Birthday” and gave me a valuable set of etchings which Aldo Moro had given him.
———–
Did he ever actually buy a gift? Or only recycled unwanted gifts? If that’s not “qamel” what is? Even in their praise they mock him without realising. You have to be a Mintoffjan to think like that.
This is insane. What John wrote indicates what a strong bond they had called FRIENDSHIP . With all due respect , but this is a good example of how much people have nothing to do with their life’s rather then criticising people and building up stories that surely are not true just to be in the centre of attention. . .
“Xerrdu l-velenu taghkom kollu fuqi. Isa, ahlu fuqi l-inka u il-karti kollha li ghandkom. Dan lili, jaghtini aktar sahha”
DM The Malta Chronicle 05.01.1939
“As for the press, there’s a story right there which they should be following up: what’s this about Mintoff sending John Attard Montalto to see the archbishop and put in an offer for the Curia building, to convert it into the Labour HQ?
It’s a big story – so why has it been left to drop?”
If I remember well, The Malta Independent (daily) had carried this story on its front page in early January 1999 or 2000.
JAM’s article may have homosexual overtones based on sexual orientation, whether real or imagined, that motivated the ‘love’ between JAM and Mintoff.
Indeed, one cannot exclude the possibility that Mr Mintoff was bisexual (many men are so). He legalised homosexual acts at a time when homosexuals were persecuted and prosectuted by the police. He also placed a woman with probable lesbian orientation as president.
All this must have sounded scandalous in his time, but what about today? Both parties are prostrating themselves to capture the gay vote and have placed openly gay politicians to the fore, probably to the disdain of Azzjoni Kattolika.
[Daphne – Exactly who are the Labour Party’s ‘openly gay’ politicians?]
Mr Mintoff, as usual was ahead of his times and not constrained by the clausrophobic mores of Malta of the 1950 to 60s.
Daphne, the shame that you try to elicit from your interpretation of JAM’s article is consistent with the ingrained prejudice the PN holds towards homosexuals (Malta Cattolicissima – no homo!).
The PN would not express such prejudice in public, as you do, for fear of losing votes. Hypocrites.
[Daphne – Pointing out that an article, written by a Labour politician about his relationship with a recently deceased and much mourned (apparently) former prime minister, has homo-erotic overtones does not constitute prejudice against homosexuals. For Christ’s sake, grow up. And your solution would be, what, exactly? To say nothing about the elephant in the article, so as not to be thought homophobic by the next cretin?]
This is insane. What John wrote indicates what a strong bond they had called FRIENDSHIP . With all due respect , but this is a good example of how much people have nothing to do with their life’s rather then criticising people and building up stories that surely are not true just to be in the centre of attention. . .
[Daphne – Oh yes, of course. Friendship. Of course.]
OMG. Daphne, you are one in a million. Please never, ever stop blogging here. Thanks for bringing this article to our attention.
I also suspect that Mintoff wanted to obtain the Curia in Floriana as the MLP’s headquarters, not just to spite the Archbishop or the Church, but also to have the Police Headquarters under his very eyes as well. Under Mintoff’s regime Malta was ruled like a police state.