Dom Mintoff

Dominic Mintoff, universally called il-Perit, the Architect, led the Maltese Labour Party for thirty-five years and was prime minister from 1955 to 1958 and again from 1971 to 1984. He trained as an architect and civil engineer, studied at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, and returned to a colony whose economy existed almost entirely to service a British naval base. His first premiership pursued an unusual solution: full integration with the United Kingdom, with Maltese members sitting at Westminster. A referendum approved it, the British lost interest, and he resigned in 1958 and turned to demanding independence instead. Back in office after independence, he rewrote Malta's relationship with everybody. He forced a far larger payment for the British bases and then closed them in 1979, ending a military presence of a hundred and eighty years. He built a welfare state with free healthcare and education, nationalised banks and utilities, and made Malta a republic in 1974. Abroad he cultivated Libya, China and the Soviet bloc, and made non-alignment a Maltese policy. The later years were harder: economic stagnation, a long and bitter quarrel with the Church over its schools, and political violence including the ransacking of the opposition newspaper and of the archbishop's curia by Labour supporters. He resigned in 1984 and lived another twenty-eight years, long enough to cast the vote that brought down a Labour government in 1998. He was a qualified architect who designed buildings in Malta before entering politics, which is where the nickname came from. His neutrality clause remains written into the Maltese constitution and shaped the country's terms of entry to the European Union two decades after he left office.

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