Joseph, she’s stolen your thunder

Mrs Bland's father in yet another 'Health and Efficiency' pose in a budgy-smuggler, with the requisite admirers.

It’s incredible how Joseph Muscat couldn’t foresee that this would happen. But then they do say that he’s not particularly bright, just egocentrically focussed.

Mrs Bland has been in the picture for under four months, since the Labour Party’s annual general conference in January, and she’s eclipsed Muscat already in terms of media coverage and interest. Granted that the interest is negative, not positive, but now when you think ‘Labour’ it’s probably Mrs Bland’s face you picture, not Muscat’s.

All she has to do now is form a strong alliance with her father’s pet sissy, Karmenu Vella (the man who absolutely adored him and coined the term ‘the Golden Years’ to describe the horrid period when he was prime minister), who already has the advantage because he’s writing the party’s electoral programme and calling lots of the shots, and Muscat will have to wear a double-layered reinforced back-guard even in bed. There’s a Mintoffian gerontocracy right there in the making.

Joseph Muscat can console himself with one thing at least: that his daughters are still in kindergarten. So Yana Mintoff will not be able to do to him what her pitiful father did to Paul Boffa when he wished to replace him as party leader, and accuse him of incest with his daughter. She would have to accuse him of one of the worst crimes of all in order to do anything like that.

Yes, that’s right. That’s what Yana’s lovely father did. And that’s why I don’t agree with the main thesis of the film Dear Dom (at least as it was reported in the press), that Mintoff Senior started out positive and ended up negative. He was the same person with the same motivation all along, from day one.

Dom Mintoff merits not a historical examination but a psychiatric one. I don’t mean that he was mad, or off the wall, not at all. But the story of Mintoff is the story of his psychology, and little else. Films and documentaries and features about Dom Mintoff invariably quote and consult historians. What they really need is an interview with somebody who is trained in psychological profiling.