A silly, twittering idiot from the Age of Aquarius

Mark Sammut has written a really good blog-post about Dom Mintoff’s daughter Joan and her reaction on television to the film Dear Dom. You should read it. I’ve put the link down below.

What strikes me most about Joan Mintoff (Yana Bland) is how very silly she is. Not silly in a make-up and ‘Oooh look what I bought today’ way, but silly in the way the inordinately privileged so often are. Her privileges were not financial. Dom Mintoff notoriously kept his wife as a beggar in her own home, and he was almost certainly as stingy with his daughters.

But she was certainly sheltered from real life in Malta, first by her mother and then because she herself chose to leave at 17 and never return.

She comes across as a woman totally detached from reality, a meddler, one who patronises the ‘unfortunate classes’ without actually knowing anything at all about them or who they are, though she speaks about them readily with a peculiar sense of detachment.

Joan Mintoff sounds like somebody from another age: a bourgeois twittering housewife who sits around with her friends and discusses charity fund-raisers to help ‘those poor, poor people’, or a daddy’s girl from the Age of Aquarius, who decides to get radical and hang about with makers of the revolution, while twittering psychedelic nonsense that sounds as though her brain was shattered by LSD in the 1960s.

(I said SOUNDS, Ms Mintoff, not WAS.)

When I listen to Joan Mintoff on televison, I can’t help thinking what little sense she makes, that her sentences don’t even string together properly, and that poor thinking, not poor knowledge of Maltese, is the real reason. She sounds, to put it clearly, befuddled, like a pottering eccentric who’s just been pulled out of mothballs.

What makes it all so much more excruciating is her archaic accent, a stark reminder that she’s been away from Malta almost as long as I’ve been alive.

We forget that accents are constantly evolving, so subtly that we don’t notice it while it’s happening, but over time the cumulative effect changes the accent almost completely. People who move away from Malta have their accents ‘frozen’ in time. That’s why returned immigrants often sound so different, and it’s not just the inflection adopted from their new home. They sound like fossils from another era.

Joan Mintoff’s accent, the bits where she sounds like a ‘rahlija’ – which is strange, because her father’s family should technically have a Grand Harbour accent, so I don’t know why she’s affecting this one – is a sound from my childhood, a sound I haven’t heard since then. I still come across some old rural person who still enunciates words that way, but barely.

It only serves to make Ms Mintoff even more of an oddball from another planet, who hasn’t a clue what she’s on about.

And the irony? That if she were anyone else, she would have been laughed out of town by the Labour Party and its supporters, because she is so obviously ridiculous, quite clearly useless and…..well, so utterly embarrassing.

But as with all parties which call themselves progressive (if you have to call yourself progressive, it means you’re anything but) and which are structured around the cult of great leaders, Mintoff’s daughter is venerated purely because she is Mintoff’s daughter.

As long as she doesn’t dye her hair neon green and fall over drunk in public, anything is fine.

She can be a total weirdo and 1960s spacehead with a Kartanzjan, who can’t put two sentences together, but the red carpet is rolled right out for her.

I’m not taking bets on how many Labour Party supporters even knew that Mintoff had daughters, before one of them popped up now as a pensioner en route to collecting her inheritance. But I would be quite curious to know what they talk about in their kitchens and living-rooms as they listen to her spacily try to tell them what she thinks about ‘poor people’ in those mangled sentences.