The rebirth of Mintoffianism

At some point, Dom Mintoff will die. When that happens, the phenomenon we have just begun to notice will come into its own and become impossible to ignore.

It is the rebirth – or resurrection – of Mintoffian politics.

Perhaps some first got an inkling of what was about to happen when incoming party leader Joseph Muscat began assiduously to court Mintoff.

On balance, though, we thought that this was just a sop to the old guard, who had been alienated when, under Alfred Sant’s guidance, they were expected to stop thinking of Mintoff as a saviour and start calling him a traitor instead.

We imagined that Muscat, who rose to prominence on Sant’s lap and who earned the moniker of Sant’s poodle, viewed Mintoff in much the same way that Sant did, but was prepared to be pragmatic about it and pretend to like him to win back votes.

We had forgotten that the devil invariably lies in the detail. We had missed the significance of Muscat’s description, in interviews, of his baptism into politics at the hands of his paternal grandmother.

She was, he said, a committed Mintoffjana who took the child Joseph to mass meetings where he was expected to admire the nation’s saviour. And he did admire him, his grandmother having repeatedly listed the reasons why he should do so.

Perhaps our antennae gave the merest twitch when all the old brontosauruses and tyrannosauruses from the cabinets of Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici saw Mintoff’s first visit to party HQ (Sant never wanted him there; they despised each other), and Muscat’s repeated visits to him in hospital, as permission to return to the fold and be very visible about it.

But again, we rationalised it by saying that Muscat was being pragmatic, working on the principle that every vote counts even if it’s a vote from Joe Grima.

Our antennae began to twitch faster when we noticed that, far from being merely civil but distant, Joseph Muscat was hard at work placing these brontosauruses in key positions, giving them titles and responsibilities, and above all, plenty of visibility.

Alex Sceberras Trigona is international secretary. Joe Grima is on Super One television. Old Labour figures like Censu Moran and Johnny Dalli are recruited to give their views in televised debates.

Then Joseph Muscat announced his shadow cabinet, and there was a collective sharp intake of breath.

Where were the promised new faces, the generazzjoni gdida? There was Silvio Parnis, which was no consolation at all, and then there were the dinosaurs.

Muscat had filled the most prominent posts in his shadow cabinet with men who had been ministers in the cabinets of Dom Mintoff, Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici and Alfred Sant, and with a woman who had been secretary-general at the General Workers Union when Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici was prime minister.

The intake of breath became sharper when Muscat released a statement saying that his party’s electoral programme for the years 2013 to 2018 would be written by Karmenu Vella, who was a minister in Mintoff’s cabinet between 1976 and 1981 and in Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici’s cabinet between 1981 and 1987.

Under Mintoff, he was Minister of Public Works (a portfolio later given to Lorry Sant) and under Mifsud Bonnici he was Minister for Industry and Commerce.

The first loud rumblings of concern began to be heard among those who were still holding out hope, three years after Muscat’s election to the leadership, for the signs of that promised new dawn.

The electoral programme for the new dawn was about to be written by a man in his 60s who had been Mintoff’s minister of public works in the 1970s. How could that be?

If you trawl through hundreds of press photographs from the last three years, you will see – with the benefit of that good thing, hindsight – that this was always going to happen.

At almost every official public appearance which Muscat made – visits here and there, meetings – Karmenu Vella is seen either glued to his side where Jason Micallef would ordinarily have been in a previous political life, or sitting listening earnestly in the front row. Vella had either moved in for the kill once Micallef had been surgically removed from Muscat’s hip, or some kind of deal had been struck.

Still we refused to see the obvious, to notice the devil common to all the detail. We told ourselves that this was happening because Muscat was too inexperienced to control these domineering shadows from the past, that they had somehow taken control and talked him into giving them back the sort of positions they had under Mintoff and Mifsud Bonnici.

But after last weekend’s Labour Party annual general conference, we couldn’t talk ourselves into thinking, anymore, of Joseph Muscat as a progressive liberal who is drowning in a sea of Mintoffian ghouls.

The annual general conference made it screamingly obvious even to the most hopeful and self-deluding that the Mintoffian ghouls are there because Muscat wants them to be there.

They are there not by default but because he chose them for the purpose. The light finally flickered in our heads: Muscat is a Mintoffian.

It had never occurred to us that he might be one, because he doesn’t fit our mental picture of the Mintoffians we knew and loved. But yes, Muscat is a Mintoffian, and what we are seeing now is the rise of Mintoffianism.

Mintoffian politics are precisely what Muscat means when he describes his party as progressive.

It hadn’t occurred to me before, but it is suddenly clear that this is so. Mintoff called himself progressive and described his policies as such. By progressive he did not mean taking the country forward but doing things which were an end in themselves and which ultimately undermined the declared purpose of giving people a better standard of living.

Mintoff rose to prominence on the battle-cry that he would improve the lot of the working-class. Muscat, when he closed the conference last Sunday, said he would create a new middle class.

Unless he plans to do this by knocking the upper segment back down into the middle, he is saying that he will turn the working class into the new middle class.

We can argue forever about the fact that having a middle would presuppose a top and a bottom and that means you can’t have the entire population in the middle, or just the middle and the top.

We can quarrel about whether increased material possessions and university degrees turn a working class person into a middle class person, or about whether working class people in Malta haven’t already acquired the trappings of middle class life in that they own their own homes, have two cars and lots of possessions, take holidays and have children at university – all thanks to Eddie Fenech Adami and Lawrence Gonzi and certainly not to Mintoff.

What matters is Muscat’s message: he is going to pull the working class up by its boot straps and save it.

How did we fail to notice the devil in that detail – the banner at the Valletta protest meeting proclaiming Muscat as Is-Salvatur? We thought it was some crank waxing nostalgic for Mintoff. It turns out it was no crank at all.

The glorification of the Mintoff years, which began as a trickle, is now in full flood.

Brazenly, all over Facebook, other social networking sites, blogs, comments-boards on internet newspapers, the 1970s and 1980s are being described as the Golden Years.

It is as though we have lived in a sort of brutish hell since 1987, including the years when Sant was prime minister because he wasn’t Mintoff and because he called Mintoff a traitor.

There was the strong stench of Mintoffianism in practically every speech at the Labour Party’s general conference last weekend. Muscat tried to play his part, but he looks and sounds too flaccid to pull it off. There is no real rage there and he is not good enough a performer or orator to simulate it.

Anglu Farrugia did his bit with his parables and speaking as though addressing a crowd of primary school children, with his Re Xemx and his Empire Station.

The class act in Mintoffianism, though, was Karmenu Vella. It was all there, down to a T, just as I remembered it from the original Act One: the jokes which are funny only if you don’t grasp their disturbing significance or their underlying menace, the ‘amusing’ banter, the raconteur style of discourse (modulated tones) interspersed with insults and threats (raised voice and anger accompanied by manual gestures).

And it goes without saying that he glorified the Mintoff years, said he was proud to have been a minister in the 1970s and 1980s. The response was Pavlovian: all people of good will who hated those years cringed in unison as we watched on television.

Muscat has miscalculated badly in thinking that it is only the Labour emblem (the old one) which triggers off a massive Pavlovian negative response. As he and his brontosauruses gather to resurrect the spectre of Mintoff, to rewrite his years in the popular imagination in letters of gold, and to reinterpret his politics for 2013, there has been an equal and opposite reaction.

People have shrunk away in dread as it becomes clear that Muscat’s progressive politics are about reinventing Mintoffianism for the 21st century – and that this is precisely why he has engaged one of the key figures in Mintoff’s cabinet, a committed Mintoffian whose Facebook account is studded with albums of photographs of Dom Mintoff, to draw up the plan.

We thought Muscat had been bullied into making an error of judgement. How stupid of us. It was intentional.

This article was published in The Malta Independent yesterday.