Mintoff daughters accuse Montebello biography of ‘unsubstantiated allegations, hearsay and lies’

The daughters of former Labour premier Dom Mintoff have disassociated themselves from a newly-published autobiography of their father, penned by Mark Montebello under the Labour Party’s publishing house SKS.

Yana Mintoff Bland and Anne McKenna accused the book, ‘The Tail That Wagged The Dog’, which is based on Mintoff’s memoirs which the family made available to Montebello, as being “riddled with inaccuracies, factual distortions, unsubstantiated allegations, hearsay and lies about Dom Mintoff.”

The Mintoff Biography | Dom in the flesh: carnal passions of the great socialist

Mintoff Bland and McKenna claimed the book contains material that was untrue or which encroached on people’s private lives.

Yana Mintoff Bland

“This is profoundly unethical and immoral. No members of the immediate family were consulted or given the opportunity to preview the publication. The one interview with a family member conducted by Mark Montebello many years ago was with Anne McKenna, who terminated it abruptly due to his unduly forceful approach. We wish to make it clear that there are many inaccuracies contained within this attempted biography in perception, detail and conclusion.”

The statement from the family carried no references to any passage in the book being challenged. Previously, the family presided over other book launches about the Labour prime minister.

Dominican friar Dr Mark Montebello carried out seven years of research for the biography

Mintoff biographer Mark Montebello has said that the memoirs published by the former Labour prime minister’s family, Mintoff: Malta, Mediterra: My Youth had had over two-thirds of the original manuscript purged from the final publication.

Mintoff began writing his autobiography in 1993 at the age of 77.

“Mintoff had previously vacillated in doing so until he spasmodically began to fill sheaves of rough paper, every corner of them, with his tiny flowing neat calligraphy, writing exclusively in English. When Mintoff’s nephew, David Mainwaring, published the official version of Mintoff’s memoirs in October 2018, 66% had being purged from it,” Montebello said. “Presumably for practical and sometimes for discreet reasons.”

Moyra and Dom Mintoff

Montebello said the public was given the impression that the published autobiography was unabridged, and that the years it covered of Mintoff’s life, namely, 1916−1943, was a first instalment. “Dom’s original and unabridged document contains well over 600,000 words, amounting to more than 2,500 printed pages. Eventually only 34% of Dom’s original was published,” Montebello said, who was given a copy of Mintoff’s full original document by Yana Mintoff Bland, Mintoff’s younger daughter right after her father’s death in August 2012.

“Mintoff seems to have intended his narrative to point up his proper place in history’s grand design. It is ironic,” Montebello said, “how [in this way] the entire structure to an architect’s work had been compromised.”

While copies of the original unabridged version of Mintoff’s memoirs can now be consulted at the National Library of Malta and the Public Library of Gozo, full use of this version was made by Montebello in his biography. “Mintoff’s memoirs were precious to me in writing this biography,” Montebello said. “When penning down his narrative, Mintoff must have kept in mind that the work would be published posthumously, and perhaps that is why he decided to be uncharacteristically forthright and blunt.”

In the book, Montebello explains in full his discoveries about Mintoff’s relation to various women, including his wife and daughters, but also quite some others. “A biography such as this,” Montebello shared, “cannot be content with half-measures. In working on it for seven whole years, three of them actually writing it, I was conscious of Mintoff’s standing within Maltese society, but also, technically, that this biography will be the first serious attempt at documenting his life, and for this reason I needed to be thorough and uncompromising with first-hand material.”