In 1964, after intense Nationalist Party negotiations with London, Malta gained independence under a Constitution that initially retained Queen Elizabeth II as head of state; a resident governor general exercised executive authority on her behalf. In addition, British influence remained pervasive in Malta’s seaports, banking, communications, military services, law enforcement and government agencies.

Upset by the terms, Mr. Mintoff boycotted the independence ceremonies and campaigned for years to oust the British, even banning The Times of London as “hostile” to the nation. He accelerated the campaign after becoming prime minister again in 1971 and largely succeeded over the next decade.

In 1974, Malta declared itself a republic within the British Commonwealth, with its president as head of state. And in 1979, when a defense agreement with Britain expired, the last British forces left at Mr. Mintoff’s insistence. He also closed the British-run bases of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Rents of $60 million were lost, creating a hole in Malta’s budget, but Mr. Mintoff insisted that the cost was justified.

Photo

“When we took office, we had an English governor general, an English queen, English currency, a Bank of England man as the head of our central bank,” he told The New York Times. “We had a police force run by a commissioner who stated openly that his loyalty was to the British crown and nobody else. This was only eight years ago. Now Malta is a republic. Everything has changed. Nothing is British anymore.”

Mr. Mintoff turned to other nations for support, provided they accepted Malta’s neutrality. He courted Libya’s Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi until they had a falling-out over offshore oil fields both claimed. But Italy pledged $95 million over five years. China offered a $40 million loan and long-term aid aimed at keeping the Soviet Union out of Malta. But Moscow edged in anyway, buying rights to store naval fuel there.

Mr. Mintoff’s efforts to play foreign rivals against one another often worked. But his domestic politics were fair game for critics, who charged that he corrupted democracy by using patronage, gerrymandering, legislation of doubtful constitutionality, even goon squads at the polls and physical bullying. He once had a fistfight in Parliament with the Nationalist Party chairman, who had called him “a despoiler of the church.”

A feud between Mr. Mintoff and the Catholic Church, the religious affiliation of 90 percent of Malta’s 350,000 people, generated heated clashes from time to time. Mr. Mintoff accused the church of threatening to excommunicate Labor Party voters, closed church-supported hospitals and demanded that the church abandon tuition charges in its schools. The church accused him of intruding on religious freedom.

Advertisement Continue reading the main story

By 1984, when he resigned, one of Europe’s longest-serving heads of government, Mr. Mintoff had eliminated foreign military bases in Malta, signed pacts for economic cooperation with the United States, China and other countries, and set his nation on a road to self-sufficiency with a welfare state, socialized medicine, diversified industries and most of its trade and tourism coming from the West.

Photo

He was a short, compact man, with a high forehead, a tight smile and a quick temper. He hated small talk and tended to walk out of long meetings. He spoke cultivated English, but deployed peppery Maltese oratory on the stump. Visitors to his office in the ornate Auberge de Castille in Valletta, the capital, or at his nearby home in Tarxien, found him genial, but not always.

Dominic Mintoff was born in Cospicua, Malta, on Aug. 6, 1916, one of nine children of Lawrence and Concetta Farrugia Mintoff. His father was a Royal Navy cook and his mother a moneylender. He studied science and engineering, earning degrees in 1937 and 1939 at the University of Malta, and in 1941 as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University in England. He worked as a civil engineer in Britain for two years.

Returning to Malta in 1943, he joined the Labor Party and soon rose to leadership posts. Four years later, he was elected to the Legislative Assembly under a new Constitution giving Malta limited self-rule. In the ensuing Labor government he became minister of reconstruction and deputy prime minister.

In 1947 he married Moyra de Vere Bentinck, a Briton. They had two daughters, Anne and Yana. His wife preferred to live in England with their daughters, and the couple lived apart for many years. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.

Mr. Mintoff became Labor Party leader in 1949, a post he retained for 35 years. After stepping down as prime minister in 1984, he kept his seat in Parliament, serving until 1998, mostly as a vociferous gadfly backbencher.