Mintoff and the ‘Lady Di factor’

The year was 1997. In Malta, former prime minister Dom Mintoff - then aged 81 - was only just beginning to rattle Alfred Sant's cage from his lonely backbench seat. And in the UK, Labour leader Tony Blair was just settling into Downing Street after winning a landslide election in May.

Then the news came in from Paris: Lady Diana, Princess of Wales, had just died in a car crash with her lover, Dodie Al Fayed, and...

CUT! OK, before proceeding with this admittedly contrived analogy, allow me to slip in a quick disclaimer. In life, there is, was and can be no real comparison between two such vastly dissimilar characters as 'Di' and 'Dom'. But in death? Comparisons are not only immediate, but also inevitable.

And if I choose Lady Diana at all, it is only because her death was recent enough to still evoke memories. Similar and arguably better analogies could be drawn with any number of larger-than-life historical figures: Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill, Leonid Brezhnev, Ronald Reagan, and many, many more.

In different ways, all of the above underscore a rather poignant political reality. People who are influential in life will invariably also exert their influence - sometimes in a very immediate sense - from beyond the grave.

So it certainly was with Lady Di. Within literally hours of her death in August 1997, the entire political landscape in the UK had visibly changed. Blair, already riding the crest of a national wave of popularity, was suddenly catapulted to almost cult-celebrity status: largely on account of his memorable eulogy for "the people's princess", authored by his press secretary Alistair Campbell.

The Royal Family, on the other hand, was plunged into deep crisis. The Queen's decision to maintain a wall of dignified silence - correct though it may have been, according to protocol - struck a deeply discordant note with an unprecedented outpouring of popular grief. And though it would eventually blow over, the immediate force of the storm came close to toppling the British monarchy altogether.

This in turn illustrates a truism which is well-known to political spin doctors the world over: the death of public figures invariably furnishes opportunities that - depending how or if they are taken - can make or break the living.

Over to Malta: where a vaguely similar (though obviously not identical) pattern has unfolded over the past few days. Dom Mintoff was not exactly a 'People's Princess' - though the epithet 'People's Perit' does have a certain ring to it - yet his passing last Monday was greeted with almost a tsunami of popular emotion.

Ironically, this selfsame outburst also underscored how much of Mintoff's troublesome legacy had remained unresolved at the time of his death: thus creating instant opportunities for the country's various political factions, most of which were duly exploited to the full.

Redefining Labour

On an immediate level, Mintoff's passing re-awakened among Labour supporters an all-but forgotten sense of belonging. And not just any old sense of belonging, either. For the first time in literally decades, your average Labour voter was made to feel (rightly or wrongly is not for me to say) as though he or she were part of something truly special and memorable... memorable enough to be eulogised by the likes of European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, and even (incredibly) Pope Benedict XVI.

One need hardly add that this fact alone served the Labour's Party current leader Joseph Muscat with the electoral equivalent of a nitroglycerine turbo-charge injection... even before he took full advantage of the event itself.

This he did by unveiling a spectacularly pre-planned two-day bonanza of funerary events: including 'spontaneous' vigils outside Mintoff's Tarxien home and also around the Freedom Monument in Birgu; a cortege that stopped by all the country's politically sensitive and significant landmarks - including the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Bormla, which to the Mintoffian mind still evokes dark memories of the notorious 'interdett' of the 1960s.

More incisively still, Joseph Muscat clearly took a leaf out of Alistair Campbell's book: delivering a studiously rehearsed oration aimed at elevating the deceased Labour icon onto a supra-national plane. Muscat's image of Malta 'orphaned' by the loss of Mintoff projected the instant impression, so popular (and controversial) in the 1970s, of Mintoff as a 'father-figure' for the entire country... but lurking beneath this superficial veneer of 'national unity' was a less obvious but infinitely more pointed objective.

Though nobody within the Labour Party dares so much as squeak the thought aloud, Mintoff's death this week finally brought to a close one of the darker and more painful chapters in that party's recent history - the rift opened up between Mintoff and Alfred Sant in the late 1990s, specifically over the 'soul' of Malta's Labour movement.

In one fell swoop, the event of the week served to eclipse (some might say 'undo') much of Sant's efforts to re-brand the Labour Party along a new and curiously Thatcherite dynamic. With hindsight, the entire Sant interlude (1992-2008) suddenly appears as little more than a temporary, uncharacteristic phase which is now very emphatically over.

It is as though Mintoff - paradoxically, through his own death - has both reclaimed and reinvigorated the Malta Labour Party, just months ahead of a pivotal general election.

PN's dilemma

For much the same reason, the implications of his death for the Nationalist Party were altogether less rosy.

Mintoff had long posed a dilemma to the PN. Literally demonized in the 1960s (and I mean 'literally': posters at that time portrayed him with horns and a tail), and viscerally hated throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Mintoff found himself suddenly transformed by NET TV into a national folk-hero during his 1998 stand-off with Sant.

But this metamorphosis alone is not enough to account for the extraordinary words of praise to emanate from former President Eddie Fenech Adami - Mintoff's former arch-enemy - on Tuesday. Fenech Adami's observation that "history will judge Mintoff favourably", and that "his good outweighed his bad" appears to directly contradict so much of the same man's earlier rhetoric, uttered three decades ago or more.

Stripped to its bare essentials, the very discrepancy between these two otherwise incompatible versions of the same man points towards an uncomfortable truth about politics in general. It is not so much that the former PN leader's words on Tuesday were in any way less honest than his words in, say, 1981... it's just that both utterances were initially dictated by his own exigencies at the time.

And it is Eddie Fenech Adami's exigencies - and not the reality that was Dom Mintoff - that have meanwhile changed beyond recognition.

Elsewhere, the dilemma for Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi was arguably greater still. With polls projecting a rather dismal electoral outlook for the PN at the moment, the last thing its leader really needed was an event that would both fire up the Opposition, as well as force him to walk a tightrope between the violent emotions of his own party supporters and the so-called 'Mintoffjani'.

Besides, it can't have helped that the man who once precipitated so much of the controversies we still associate with the name 'Mintoff', happened to also be his own great uncle: Archbishop Michael Gonzi.

Yet all this only emphasises how very competently the prime minister actually handled a situation which (let's face it) could only work to his own political disadvantage. His immediate offer of a State funeral both disarmed the Opposition and defused any potential national outrage.

On a separate level there was a pleasing symmetry to the fact that Mintoff himself, in 1980, had made an identical offer to the bereaved family of former Prime Minister George Borg Olivier.

In both cases, the timing of these funerals worked manifestly against the government in spite of its generosity. Mintoff went on to technically 'lose' the 1981 election, while present indications point towards a repetition of history in this respect.

It is therefore to Gonzi's credit that he would read the national mood correctly, and deliver a formal reaction that is also quite stunning in its sheer duplicity. Mintoff, he said, was a 'leading personality' whose 'great work, commitment and determination' led to 'developments and profound changes which marked Malta and Gozo'.

Labour supporters naturally interpreted that as a magnanimous salute; discerning Nationalists no doubt appreciated the subtlety of the veiled implications... for instance, by substituting the word 'marked' with 'scarred'.

Either way, Gonzi pulled it off admirably in the end - though it remains to be seen how long this 'truce' will actually last.

'Mizbla' no more

In the final analysis, however, it was the Catholic Church that stood to gain (or lose) the most from this turn of events. The shadow cast by the notorious 'interdett' of 1960 was such that no amount of rapprochement had ever quite managed to dispel it. At one point, former Archbishop Joseph Mercieca did attempt to extend a olive branch across the divide: issuing a half-hearted and rather vague 'apology', in which he both asked for forgiveness and also forgave 'all who had been hurt or confused' by the Church.

But no names were ever mentioned, and by and large this conciliatory gesture failed to achieve the desired effect. 

In the end it turned out to be Mintoff to make the final offer himself: his eventual demise providing the Church with a unique, never-to-be-repeated opportunity to bury the hatchet once and for all... along with the man to whom the same Church once denied sacraments for nine whole years.

It is a turnaround that is somewhat difficult to digest... at least, for those who actually valued Mintoff's attempts to 'rid Malta of the cobwebs of the Inquisition'. Yet the sight of the mighty Catholic Church practically prostrating herself before Mintoff's casket was ultimately so powerful and evocative an image that it instantly succeeded where a million apologies would probably have failed.

Not only was Mintoff all-but canonised in St John's yesterday - but the Pope himself took time out of his busy schedule to salute such an unlikely son of Rome... and like the walls of Jericho, the Cathedral itself was shaken to its foundations by Mintoffian applause.

What greater triumph, some might argue, for a man the same Church once tried to destroy outright? Yet this thought - satisfying though it undeniably must be, to an ardent Mintoff supporter - must be counterbalanced by another: the idea that Dom Mintoff, who in life had always boycotted Church ceremonies on a point of principle, would at the last be claimed by the selfsame force he once tried to vanquish.

Either way, it was not just Dom Mintoff who was buried yesterday. With him was also interred the last echo of an epochal battle that, for better or for worse, made Malta the country it is today.