As he himself points out, he had a very Roman Catholic upbringing and as a teenager used to teach the Bible to younger children.

Bartolo states that the road that convinced him that his place was within the Labour Party was a long tortuous one during which he explored Karl Marx, Mohandas Gandhi, Vladimir Lenin, Martin Luther King Jr. and spent a year in Sicily working with an anti-Mafia activist Danilo Dolci.

[6] Bartolo is a prolific writer having been a consistent contributor to the local media since his early teens and is considered to be one of the principal ideologists within the Malta Labour Party.

Bartolo's moderate beliefs are seen by many as being the sort of views which will move the Labour Party from being perceived as a slightly outmoded traditional working class party to one that, within the new Maltese social realities, captures the support of emerging liberal elements within the middle classes while still remaining loyal to its working-class roots.

[7] In August 2013, Bartolo nominated Cyrus Engerer within the Labour Party for the 2014 European Parliament elections.