When Friggieri met Mintoff and other snippets from behind the curtains of power

Last Friday marked five years since Oliver Friggieri passed away. In Noti (Notes), Mario Cutajar remembers the moment the news reached the Office of the Prime Minister in November 2020. Work in the room came to an abrupt halt. Those present shared memories of the writer, poet and scholar who had shaped Malta’s cultural imagination for decades.

Cutajar recalls meeting him in Delimara, and he evokes the famous photo of Dom Mintoff standing beside Friggieri – Mintoff saying, “Let’s take a picture together … you are the spirit, I am the matter,” after years of being pressed by Friggieri to write a biography.

Noti was written by Mario Cutajar.

Someone around the table said protocol would not allow a state funeral. Cutajar pushed back. Nothing prevented the State from deciding to give Friggieri a funeral by the State and a memorial, he argued. For him, it was not simply about protocol, but about what the State chooses to remember and how it chooses to show respect. In the end, that is exactly what happened. He also argued that the memorial should rise in Floriana: not only Friggieri’s hometown, but the symbolic entrance to Valletta along Triq Sant’Anna, close to Dun Karm, whose work Friggieri had studied.

On a personal note, I will never forget December 11, 2023. Besides being my wedding anniversary, it was also the day I was involved in the preparations for the inauguration of the Friggieri monument.

I worked side by side with Cutajar so that, among other things, we could include in his speech as Chairman of Heritage Malta a recorded excerpt of Friggieri speaking about identity – a topical theme that fitted perfectly with Cutajar’s arguments. The clip of Friggieri’s intervention dating back to 1994 and broadcast on 100.2 LIVE FM, was kindly provided to me by my friend and former colleague at PBS Ltd, Simon Grima.

The December 2023 inauguration of Oliver Friggieri's monument.

Details that rarely make it into public debate

In Noti, Cutajar deliberately avoids the classical political memoir. He says from the outset that readers should not expect a biography or a long exercise in the first person. Instead, he offers a series of episodes: some from his nine-plus years (2013–2022) as Head of the Civil Service and Secretary to the Cabinet, others from his childhood and youth in Valletta, and others from his wider public life.

Noti is full of details that rarely make it into public debate but define how the Maltese State works day-to-day.

He notes, for instance, that since 1981 general elections have always been held on a Saturday. On the Friday before polling day, all persons of trust in every ministry are required to resign. That same day, ministers return their official cars and GM number plates. The police hold on to the vehicles; the Cabinet Office keeps the plates.

Once a new Cabinet is appointed, the cars are reassigned and the GM plates reissued. The numbering reflects each minister’s seniority in Cabinet, set by the prime minister and usually based on experience in Cabinet, in Parliament and in the party.

Records also tell their own story. Whenever he takes on a post, Cutajar says he starts by leafing through past documentation. As Secretary to the Cabinet, he noticed that under Nationalist administrations, Cabinet minutes were recorded in English, while under Labour they were written in Maltese. No rule dictates this. He believes it stems from instinct; in fact, before checking how others had worked, he had already started writing minutes in Maltese.

Melvic Zammit is a communications strategist and former TVM journalist.