Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1389773
12 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 4 JULY 2021 NEWS I t's time the tale were told. Of how the architect of Malta's post-Independence industrial and welfare society – Dom Mintoff – jealously guard- ed a secret life of philandering. Or at least, one to which he freely admitted to in the mem- oirs bequeathed by his one of his children to Dominican friar and philosopher Mark Monte- bello. In a one-of-kind biography of Labour's 'salvatur', the fiery, anti-colonial, anti-clerical, pa- triarch of Maltese socialism, Montebello has given Mintoff back to the people: as a human being, prone to existential frail- ties and fears, as a man of im- perfection 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. Fittingly, it is titled The Tail That Wagged The Dog, and perhaps surprisingly, embraced by Labour's own publishing house, SKS. For this door in- to the mind of the energet- ic, intransigent, mean, stingy, iron-fisted, Oxford-educated socialist visionary, who took up arms against Paul Boffa to con- trol Labour from after the war right up to 1984, brings home the personal life of Dom. Dom was a man of excessive self-re- gard: as with his fixation for health, sports and daily swim- ming, so was his quest for pow- er and his command of public adoration coupled with a crav- ing for female attention, varie- ty and passion. 'Brinkmanship' Dom, Dom the risk-taker, Dom the challenger... how could mo- nogamy even exist in this psy- chological bandwidth? *** D om and Moyra Bentinck were joined in wedlock in the stealthiest of manners. The couple married on Saturday, 22 November 1947 at a tiny 19th century chapel at Bir id-Deheb, the outskirts of Żejtun, in the middle of nowhere. The chapel's rector was Canon Ġwann Vella, Dom's friend who served at Bormla's parish. Dom's witness was his clos- est friend and 'dearest socialist comrade' Speditu Gatt – the man he met in 1935 at the Paola Labour club and with whom he would enjoy 'romping sprees' in Birżebbuġa meeting up with girls, 'some single, others mar- ried, to have sex under the aegis of Socialism'. 19-year-old Dom was back then nursing a soon- to-end relationship with Melita 'Lita' Lucchese, which he de- scribes in detail: 'We caressed, petted, kissed, embraced, pressed our bosoms, and like all healthy teenagers on the loose, satisfied all our cravings, shot of hard-core intercourse' – all avenues Dom and Lita took to defy 'sin, traditions and con- ventions' and the State-Church edicts and taboos on sex. But Lita was faithful; Dom was not. With Speditu's clan, Dom's es- capades were a 'weekend res- pite' from Lita's amorous beck- oning. Montebello writes that Dom "convinced himself that Lita herself benefited from his regular philandering. 'It also gave Lita a sensible let-up from my daily late evening sieges'... Dom seems to have been full of excuses... It was a sort of in- nocuous training sessions, he seems to suggest, of the am- orous type... 'it was a game of hazards like diving off a cliff...'." Dom would confess to these erotic Saturday afternoons only late in old age, when he start- ed writing his memoirs in the 1990s. This mix of camaraderie, sexual impulses, water games, flirting and singing till 2am be- came unmissable. 'At no time during my long life has work stopped me from finding time for my carnal passions', Dom wrote. No clerical sanction or work pressure could deprive him from 'savouring the pro- hibited thrill of a Saturday af- ternoon secret sex session'. Even at Oxford in his semi-monastic life as Rhodes scholar, Dom would confess to embarrassing himself ogling pretty women 'in a social envi- ronment totally out of my Bast- jun depth', and feeling 'lone- ly and sex starved'. The devil found work for Mintoff's idle hands, who when close to a girl he fancied, 'the erotic impulse to undress her, grab her appeal- ing flesh into my aching arms, and entwine my body with hers was stronger than I had known since leaving home.' His vaca- tions there were spent at British Unprecedented access to his personal memoirs and his confidants have given us Mark Montebello's biography of the man behind Mintoff – Dom – granting us passage into a secret world Debonair Dom: a pin-up look with sunglasses and pipe Right: a memento from the practically clandestine marriage of Dom and Moyra in 1947. Not even family members were present for the marriage in a Bir id-Deheb chapel, with just two witnesses, two priests and Dom's bestman