Dimech biographer Mark Montebello pens Dom Mintoff biography

Dominican friar and philosopher Dr Mark Montebello, author of several works on the life of the radical democrat Manwel Dimech, has announced the publication of the first biography of the Labour leader Dom Mintoff.

Mintoff died in 2012. He led the Labour Party from 1949, in a party split that won him the working class of the Labour movement, until political crisis in 1984 saw him bow out of government.

“With this first scientific biography of Dom Mintoff we get to know ‘Il-Perit' as never before. Though many are acquainted to bits and pieces of him, none know him completely. This biography invites one and all to revise whatever is known about him until now,” Dr Mark Montebello, the author of Dom Mintoff’s biography The Tail that Wagged the Dog: The Life and Struggles of Dom Mintoff (1916–2012) said when meeting Maria Bartolo and Charles Hili, Mintoff’s relations from Gozo at it-Tokk, Victoria Gozo.

At the event, organised by publishing house SKS, Mintoff’s biography was announced to the public, which will soon be officially issued.

Montebello said he had been working on this biography since 2013, and it took him three years to write it. “The biography goes into the motives of Mintoff’s commissions and omissions,” Montebello said, “since his earliest years at Bormla till his last public appearances almost a century later.”

He said the biography will reveal many aspects of Mintoff’s personality that have hitherto remained hidden.

The work was completed from thousands of primary-source documents archived locally and abroad, and scores of interviews.

Montebello pointed out that the book’s name, The Tail that Wagged the Dog, was chosen from among many possible others to metaphorically highlight Mintoff’s significance to the Maltese nation.

“Mintoff was but a tail which, however, shook the dog, or influenced the Maltese State, so radically.”