Reminiscing about the events that led to the publication of Mark Montebello’s biography, I’ve just realised that Judge Lawrence Mintoff went beyond demanding requesting the Prime Minister and Labour Party leader to modify the biography before it was published.
He was even furious when the book was published, printed and distributed and Judge Lawrence Mintoff turned furious in anger as he literally demanded the Prime Minister to remove the book from the bookshelves.
It was insanity. I remember it was one of the bizarre episodes of attempted book censorship during my living history, owing to the very fact that all this drama came from a sitting a Judge. This episode completely passed my mind before the Judge is reopened the “scandal” in his latest historic letter.
What is also bothering me about this is that the history of Astrid Mintoff is being censored because men are embarrassed about it. Hilarious that of all things, it’s the behaviour of women that they are embarrassed about. Now that I have begun to remember the events that led to the events leading to the publication of Mark Montebello’s biography of Mintoff, I also remember that Mark Montebello did indeed speak to Astrid Mintoff and asked her to interview her about her life and her relationship with the Dom. She was unsure whether to sit for an interview but her son, Judge Lawrence Mintoff, along with other relatives, pressured her not to speak up.
Astrid Mintoff is a figure in history in her own right – she is not just an appendix or a peripheral object. The fact that she was photographed topless on a yacht with Dom Mintoff doesn’t mean she was having an affair with him: we know that she had a long-term affair with him because of multiple eye-witnesses close to her with stories of multiple personal events that corroborate this history. We also know that she held a position of informal power in Dom Mintoff’s inner circle of power which led to the resentment of Joe Camilleri. Astrid was not just an ordinary woman neither a slave to circumstances: she walked and participated in the inner circle of power actively giving orders and dictating to Mintoff’s own men.
We have underestimated the role that women played in the socialist movement of the 1970s partly due to these taboos. Astrid Mintoff could have demanded anything she wanted from Mintoff and her proximity to him also brought her close to other leading businessmen. Do you think that Astrid Mintoff did not influence these powerful men on policies relating to women and other affairs? Not to mention, that Astrid Mintoff was not the only one. There were plenty of other women who acted and behaved on their own terms, accessed men of power and influenced these men’s politics.
There is nothing to be embarrassed about. If anything we need a biography exclusively about Astrid Mintoff herself.
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