The story that no Yana-approved Mintoff hagiography will ever tell you

And eulogies of praise are being written and spoken to this. If these are our heroes, then what are we?

It is at times like these that I really wish that I lived somewhere with a more efficient press.

When you conceal information from your readers on the grounds of ‘taste’ or it being ‘not right’, you are doing them – and society in general – a grave disservice.

People need all the information there is, so that they can make up their own minds about a situation.

When newspapers decide what information their readers should be allowed to have, that is self-censorship and they are presenting those readers with a picture that is false because so much crucial information is missing.

If you are not prepared to run the full story, don’t run anything at all, because a part-story is a false story.

So earlier this week, The Times carried an interview with Raymond Mintoff, brother of the recently deceased. In typical style, he wore an undervest, was unwashed, and sat in a messy room. He also wore a large gold Rolex.

The Times reported:

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.

Oh great, I thought. So Mintoff gives one brother a Rolex he doesn’t want (“Ha, hu din”) and meanwhile he conducts a long affair with his other brother’s wife.

And Raymond Mintoff talks about how generous his brother Dom was, while all the while he knows what Dom did to their other brother. And the press fails to put this generosity in context.

I just cannot stand this sickening, lousy hypocrisy for one second longer. The fact that Dom Mintoff cuckolded his own brother over a long period of time is not only of public interest because it gives us more insight into just how vile this man was. The bond between brothers is supposed to be inalienable. What sort of man cuckolds his own brother?

But it is especially of public interest because it had public consequences for Malta and was responsible in great part for the rise of Lorry Sant and the disintegration of the Labour government into terrible corruption and abuse.

Lorry Sant had in his possession compromising photographs of Wenzu Mintoff’s mother (the sister-in-law in question) which were clearly taken at Dom’s summer house at Delimara, L-Gharix.

We will probably never know how Sant got hold of those photographs. What we do know is that he used them to blackmail and threaten Dom Mintoff and that this was his hold over him. It why Mintoff couldn’t control Lorry Sant and allowed him to do as he pleased.

Unfortunately, we discovered this only in 1991, when Labour had been out of government for four years. While Labour was in government, we wondered why Lorry Sant was the only man of whom Mintoff was frightened, and who rose to the status of an uncontrollable robber baron because of that.

In 1991, Lorry Sant rose in parliament and amid a lot of shouting in Wenzu Mintoff’s direction (the latter had resigned the Labour whip and held his seat for AD) waved a brown envelope about.

He said that the contents of this envelope would focus Wenzu Mintoff’s mind.

The Speaker of the House asked to look inside the envelope when it was placed on the table of the house. Wenzu Mintoff did so too, and recognised his mother naked at L-Gharix.

In the shock of the moment, he suddenly understood why, when he was a child, his mother was never at home on Wednesdays. Mintoff did not go into the office on Wednesdays. That was his custom.

The Speaker ordered that the envelope and its contents be locked up securely. Wherever it was locked up, it is either still there or has been spirited away, but who cares at this stage. We know now what was in it. Nobody wants to see the actual photographs. It would be prurient.

We also know that neither the facts of this matter nor the photographs will be included in the official biography of Dom Mintoff, which will be Yana-approved.

When Dom Mintoff’s brother discovered that he had been having an affair with his wife, he went to see him at L-Gharix and they came to blows.

Dom Mintoff was struck about the head and face with a hard object, and when he appeared in public with visible signs of that encounter, the excuse given was that he had come off his horse.

This is what I mean about the weakness of the press in Malta. Mintoff’s affair with his brother’s wife made Lorry Sant’s uncontrollable corruption and abuse possible, through blackmail.

Imagine a British prime minister having a prolonged affair with his brother’s wife and the press keeping quiet about it, even after it becomes obvious that a key minister in that prime minister’s cabinet had compromising photographs of the affair and was using them for blackmail and intimidation.

Lots of things happen and have happened in Malta only because the press is and was hopelessly inadequate.

Instead of interviewing Raymond Mintoff about the gold Rolex his brother gave him, the press should be telling readers about the consequences for Malta of Dom Mintoff being unable to keep his pants on, not even around his own brother’s wife.