Sex and socialism: Dom’s bedroom secrets

Unprecedented access to his personal memoirs and confidants have given us Mark Montebello’s biography of the man behind Mintoff – Dom – granting us passage into a secret world.

In a one-of-kind biography of Labour’s ‘salvatur’ entitled The Tail That Wagged The Dog, Montebello has given Mintoff, the fiery, anti-colonial, anti-clerical, patriarch of Maltese socialism, back to the people: as a human being, prone to existential frailties and fears, as a man of imperfection striving as much as possible to stray away from the fall, a man of action trying to keep death away from the door with every word uttered, every single burst of energy, every single political action.

But this door into the mind of the energetic, intransigent, mean, stingy, iron-fisted, Oxford-educated, socialist visionary, is bringing home the personal life of Dom, a man of excessive self-regard: as with his fixation for health, sports and daily swimming, so was his quest for power and his command of public adoration coupled with a craving for female attention, variety and passion. Brinkmanship-Dom, Dom the risk-taker, the challenger... how could monogamy even exist in this psychological bandwidth?

In a four-page special in MaltaToday on Sunday we document excerpts from Montebello’s biography on the life of Dom at home, with his long-suffering wife Moyra.

Montebello displays the contrast between the unassuming, humble and pious Moyra and Dom the great pretender, larger than life but “the all-too-human Dom nearly nobody could know”. In the forthcoming years of his marriage and his immersion into a lucrative profession and full-time politics, together with his sporting passions, Mintoff’s brash and domineering attitude was part of family life at The Olives in Tarxien.

Read the four-page special in MaltaToday on Sunday here

Fr Mark Montebello, author of The Tail That Wagged The Dog, a biography of Dom Mintoff