DA TOBIAS JONES:
"LA COMBINAZIONE DI QUALCUNO CHE E' MOLTO RICCO CON UNA COPPIA CHE MOLTO CHIARAMENTE VORREBBE ESSERLO"
ED ECCO CHE QUELL'ESTATE IN SARDEGNA DIVENTA MENO STRANA DA CAPIRE:
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
The bewitching appeal of Berlusconi
By Tobias Jones
(Filed: 02/03/2006)
There is, perhaps, only one thing more mysterious than Silvio Berlusconi's finances: it's the mystery of his magnetism. To most people it's unfathomable how the upper echelons of the British Establishment - from David Mills to Tony Blair - could become quite so close to him. Of all the possible summer holiday destinations, one wonders why the Blairs chose Berlusconi's Sardinian villa 18 months ago.
There's no impropriety in accepting invitations, and the Blairs, it is well known, accept as many as possible. The only clue as to why they chose Sardinia lies in what it means to be a guest of Berlusconi. His generosity is well known. He loves to display his wealth; it is said that he talks money morning, noon and night. The combination of someone who is very wealthy with a couple who so clearly wish they were makes that summer in Sardinia less weird to understand.
One suspects that the story with Mills is rather different. Berlusconi's attraction for him was probably intellectual. In 1980, when their relationship began, the Italian economy was notorious for its Chinese boxes. Having effectively become Berlusconi's London lawyer, Mills was being asked to recreate those boxes abroad and offshore. One can imagine an ambitious young lawyer relishing the challenge as much as the income.
For some Italians, Berlusconi's attraction is rather different. Above all, he's hilarious. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently. You smile partly because he tells good jokes, but also because of his audacity. He will walk around boring international conferences making signs behind people's backs or offering a matey shoulder massage to a fellow European politician.
There was a book published in Italy three years ago, a collection of his one-liners and off-the-cuff comedy, called Berlusconate (meaning "Berlusconi-isms"). Although compiled by people who profoundly disliked him, he emerged as a roguish clown. Of the many nicknames he's been given, "pifferaio" - "the piper" - seems most apt. He hypnotises people with his overtures.
Those closest to the prime minister recognise him as a fantasist of endless imagination. The late Indro Montanelli was Italy's Bill Deedes. As a journalist he covered everything from the war in Abyssinia to the ascent of Berlusconi. Montanelli used to joke that Berlusconi was "the sincerest liar I've ever met". He spoke of a man who was extraordinarily persuasive, a man who could convince you of almost anything. Even Berlusconi's wife, Veronica, has called him in public "the most amusing liar I know". Liars tend to be great, albeit unreliable, company.
Middle-aged men seem more susceptible to his charms, because he's blokey. I've been in the media scrum around him, with all the microphones being pushed under his chin. We'll be hanging on his words, waiting for an observation on international politics, and he'll look at a female journalist's necklace and compliment her perfume. He famously said that Parma became the seat of the European Food Safety Authority rather than Helsinki because he flirted with the (female) Finnish prime minister. "I'm incapable of saying no," is one of his famous lines. "Luckily I'm a man and not a woman."
Italian politics can be very pompous, but Berlusconi comes across as a street-fighter. He talks about football and girls and vast sums of money. He has written the lyrics for a CD of Neapolitan love songs while in power, and he jokes about how good looking he is for a man in his 70th year.
It's possible that foreigners bond with Berlusconi because they don't quite pick up on the subtleties of the way he speaks his own language. His accent is from the Milanese hinterland, and he always comes across as colloquial rather than stately. Call me a snob, but even I can tell that Berlusconi makes frequent grammatical mistakes and forgets subjunctives. Every speech sounds like the sales pitch of a small businessman from Lombardy. He is, says an Anglophile friend of mine from Parma, the Italian equivalent of David Brent from The Office.
Students of realpolitik are particularly vulnerable to the Berlusconi effect. With his media empire, his football team and his control of 100 per cent of Sicilian parliamentary seats, he really does have an extraordinary amount of muscle. It can be scintillating, as well as depressing, to see how he uses that power: just before Christmas he unilaterally rewrote an electoral law with a general election only months away. What politician or lawyer wouldn't be fascinated?
There are now suggestions, and I don't say this to be facetious, that Berlusconi is actually becoming delusional. It's not merely that his campaign for re-election has relied almost entirely on demonising opposition politicians, abusing magistrates and invoking the spectre of communism. It's more that, in making comparisons between himself and Jesus, Noah, Moses and Napoleon, he seems deranged. He sincerely sees himself as a messiah. What used to be a splinter of madness, the appeal of the maverick, has turned into egocentricity bordering on megalomania.
His levels of surveillance and control are legendary. None of his followers are allowed to eat garlic - he gave all Forza Italia MPs breath-fresheners after he caught a whiff of garlic on the breath of one of them. Absurd as it is, a few friends in the press corps in Rome say they can now tell how solid Berlusconi's coalition is by the "halitosis test".
"I have a superiority complex," Berlusconi has admitted. And at the same time, he is a master of playing the victim card. "Against me they use the same methods that Goebbels used against the Jews," he said of Espresso magazine a few years ago. One never knows, with Berlusconi, which version you're going to get: the exceptionally powerful leader or the wounded victim who is being persecuted.
Sometimes you see both at once. In 2003 I was in a Milanese courtroom where Berlusconi was on trial. As he emerged into the crowded corridor, someone shouted loudly: "You'll end up like Ceausescu." Berlusconi called police officers over and told them to take down the man's details. It was an eloquent snapshot of a man who seems both threatened and threatening.
There's no middle way with Berlusconi. There's something so primitive about him that, almost on instinct, people either love him or loathe him. He inspires widespread paranoia, but also extraordinary loyalty (often, funnily enough, from former Communists). Personally, I'm not a great fan. I've been laughing less ever since he said (in an interview with The Spectator) that Mussolini didn't really kill political prisoners - he just sent them to the Italian border.
Tobias Jones is the author of The Dark Heart of Italy (Faber & Faber)