All hail mister B!

All hail Berlusconi
He's the gaffe-plagued populist who thrives on controversy. A self-made plutocrat with a taste for La Dolce Vita, pancake make-up and the grandest of gestures. He's been called a clown and a buffoon; but he's Italy's richest and most influential public figure and is well on his way to becoming the country's longest-serving head of state since Mussolini. John Carlin profiles Silvio Berlusconi, a Roman emperor for the 21st century

John Carlin
The Observer, Sunday 18 January 2004


There's always a tingle of anticipation when Silvio Berlusconi enters the stage, a sense that something shockingly out of the ordinary will happen. Italy's accidental prime minister - the fabulously rich businessman turned astonishingly successful politician - has a knack for disrupting the earnest protocols of office. Kissing the bride at an Islamic wedding in Turkey; insinuating to the prime minister of Denmark that he should have sex with his (Berlusconi's) wife; calling a German parliamentarian a Nazi: it has all been part of the burlesque repertoire of the man that Italians have come to know - some in jest, some with admiration - as il Cavaliere, the knight.
A press conference in Rome last month with Russian president Vladimir Putin presented a further opportunity for outrage or - depending on your point of view - delight. The surprise was that for the first few minutes of the ceremony it seemed as if this was an opportunity he had resolved to pass up. Possibly out of respect for the man he likes to call his 'caro amico Vladimiro', he was on his best behaviour, nodding ponderously, lips pursed with almost comical solemnity, as Putin trotted out the pieties habitual on these occasions.

When the mood changed, when the dour Russian ventured a dull pleasantry, Berlusconi released a sunny smile - then held the smile on his copper-coloured face, dense with make-up, for a good half minute, before allowing it gently, sagely to recede. To the relief of Berlusconi's anxious aides, and to the disappointment of the large journalistic contingent, it was all going very smoothly indeed. Until a reporter from Le Monde thought to ask Putin a double-barrelled beast of a question about human rights in Chechnya and the political motivations behind a decision by the Russian judiciary to jail the country's richest tycoon. The former KGB man, unaccustomed to this sort of bolshiness from reporters, stiffened. Berlusconi adopted the guise of a man who had suffered a dreadful personal affront. 'What! Insult a guest in my house? How dare you?' his face seemed to say.

So he did what any good cavaliere would do in the circumstances. He leapt to Putin's defence, interposing himself between the Russian and his French assailant. Reaching out a hand and grabbing Putin by the arm, as if to say, 'Leave this to me, Vladimiro', he fixed his eyes defiantly on the rude interrogator and declared, 'I would like to say something first, if I may.' Introducing himself to the assembled company as Putin's 'defence lawyer, 'even if he has not asked me', Berlusconi proceeded to clear his bemused client on all counts. First, all these stories of Russian human rights abuses in Chechnya were 'legends' fabricated by the press. He knew all about this, he said, forced to endure, as he had been, the hostility of 85 per cent of the Italian press. As for the notion, similarly disseminated by the 'false' press, that Putin had anything at all to do with the decision to jail the oil billionaire, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Berlusconi knew the Russian president well enough to offer 'a guarantee' that he respected the division between the executive power and the judiciary.

The gaffe was not Berlusconi's most ludicrous, but it was one of the most serious - because he was speaking in his capacity as president of the European Union's Council of Ministers and it is a well-known fact that the EU disapproves of what it considers to be brutal human rights abuses in Chechnya by the Russians, and that it has grave reservations about what many Kremlin observers have taken to be a Putin-inspired decision to go after Russia's richest man.

Foreign ministries up and down Europe immediately disowned Berlusconi's remarks, making it plain he was not speaking on their behalf. Such, indeed, was the outrage Berlusconi generated that his remarks have been taken by foreign ministries across the continent as a reason seriously to re-examine the validity of the principle of a rotating EU presidency. Berlusconi's six-month incumbency, which ended last month, failed in its central task of drawing up a new European constitution and has been roundly condemned as a fiasco in the European parliament. Graham Watson, leader of Britain's Liberal Democrat contingent in the parliament, told Berlusconi his presidency had been 'a personal failure'. 'In six short months the presidency... has shown contempt for the European Union's policy toward Russia and has offended Canada,' said Watson, referring to Berlusconi's unilateral decision to cancel an annual Canada-EU summit. 'You set your presidency a target of a constitution by Christmas and by your own standards you failed.'

Maybe. But in the Berlusconi universe interests - concrete things that you can see and hold - count for a lot more than vague notions of 'standards'. Il Cavaliere's perception of what lies in his, and maybe even Italy's, self-interest includes forging closer ties with Russia, which means - to hell with what the Liberal Democrats or the Canadians might think - being good friends with Putin. As one of his economic advisers admiringly explained, Berlusconi has had 'the vision' to see that a close strategic alliance with Russia is good for Italian business. And he has accordingly invested a good deal of time in cementing that alliance. He has met with Putin four times in the past year; once, in the summer, at his holiday residence in Sardinia, where he invited the Russian leader's wife and two daughters and filled nine of his own villas with the impressive Russian retinue. (He had to buy two new ones at the last minute in order to accommodate a larger than expected bodyguard contingent.)

Putin is a cold fish, but Berlusconi's opulence and personal warmth have charmed him. A KGB apparatchik most of his adult life, who would have sampled little in the way of la dolce vita during his years as a spy in East Germany, Putin is a sucker for Berlusconi's Mediterranean largesse. The Italian's gallant intervention on his behalf in the face of French journalistic perfidy was the consummation of a most unlikely marriage. As Berlusconi raved, Putin glowed. Why unlikely? Because Berlusconi is the very incarnation of the thing that, in his own country, Putin most detests. The view of most independent analysts of the Russian political scene is that the reason Khodorkovsky was jailed is because he and other Russian tycoons had made an unspoken deal with the Kremlin, whereby they would be allowed to set about their tax-dodging, filthy rich ways so long as they never, ever crossed the line into politics. Khodorkovsky did, funding political parties opposed to Putin, and that was the end of him.

To say that Berlusconi, who is the richest man in Italy (far richer than Khodorkovsky), has crossed the line between big business and politics would be a ludicrous understatement. Never in history - at least not in the history of western democracy - has anything like it ever been seen. It's as if Rupert Murdoch were president of the US, but in addition to owning Fox he also owned CBS and NBC. But Berlusconi, in the Italian context, is actually more than that. He is a mix of Murdoch and Bill Gates, laced with a generous measure of Mohamed Al Fayed. Berlusconi - or, in some cases, his wife and children - owns virtually all of Italy's commercial TV networks, the country's biggest advertising company, the biggest publishing house, the biggest film distribution business, two national newspapers, 50 magazines and internet service providers. He is a big player in the construction business and insurance, and he is president of Italy's most glamorous football club, current European champions AC Milan. On top of all that, as head of a political party that he - or rather his advertising company, Publitalia - created in two months in 1994, he has been elected prime minister of Italy twice. His current tenure has stretched to two and a half years, the second-longest run of a head of government since Mussolini. If he makes it through to Christmas 2004, and the betting is that he will, the record will be all his own.

There are two ways to respond to these breathtaking facts. The first, and most habitual in the Protestant cultures of the north, is moral outrage. Scandinavian - not to mention German - politicians are always getting terribly exercised over what quite obviously are his stupefying conflicts of interest. The Economist, joined with sporadic vehemence by the big American newspapers, has led the charge in the English-speaking media against what many unsurprisingly perceive to be the rampant manner in which he has traduced the tenets of capitalist democracy.

The second way to respond to Berlusconi (and it does not necessarily have to be at odds with the first - one may bury and praise him at the same time) is with plain admiration. 'L'tat c'est moi,' declared Louis XIV, and no doubt he was pretty pleased with himself when he said it. But it's one thing to be a hereditary Sun King 100 years before the French revolution; quite another to be Sun King (Berlusconi does, incidentally, describe himself as 'the anointed one' from time to time) at the beginning of the 21st century. And not, with respect, in Equatorial Guinea, but in Italy, the world's sixth largest economy. Though that's the least of it. We are talking about a quite magnificent country here, whose contribution to humanity, whose history, is awe-inspiring. The list of great Italians is, simply, unbeatable. Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Christopher Columbus, Dante, Puccini, Michelangelo, Vivaldi, Thomas Aquinas, Marconi, Virgil, Cicero, Julius Caesar. And now, following in the great tradition, Silvio Berlusconi. A buffoon, maybe, who is on record as describing himself as the greatest Italian of the 20th century; corrupt, quite possibly, as he has spent much of his life fending off sundry charges of bribery and illegal enrichment - charges which he says are politically motivated. But, say what you like about him, the one thing you cannot deny is that he is also a genius. He has to be, otherwise how could he have amassed and retained such an extraordinary concentration of wealth and power? Everything he touches turns to gold, even if, as one Italian journalist suggested, he then takes it.

The Roman emperors knew that the secret to exercising peaceful rule over the people was to provide them with bread and circus. Well, Berlusconi owns the circus, pretty much all of it - the TV, the football, the magazines, the books. And as a head of government, who also happens to own Italy's biggest supermarket chain, he also controls, in the widest sense of the word, the bread.

Just in case anyone entertained any doubts as to his all-pervasive ubiquity, he posted his personal biography, the magnificently bound An Italian Story, to every single family in Italy during the 2001 election campaign. Replete with glossy colour photographs of a relentlessly grinning Silvio, the 128-page book (12m copies were made) describes Berlusconi as 'the perfect personification of the Italian dream'. Rather more accurately, Italy being a country where people rarely imagine they will ever rise out of the social stratum into which they were born, he might be described as a perfect Italian imitation of the American Dream.

He was born in 1936 in Milan, to ordinary middle-class parents: his father, Luigi, was a bank employee; his mother, Rosella, was a secretary at a Pirelli factory. A bright lad at school, he displayed his entrepreneurial bent early on by charging his schoolmates for help with their Latin and Greek. He then paid his way through university working as a piano-playing crooner on cruise ships. Singing remains a passion to this day. Further evidence, if evidence were needed, of the man's genius is that - in between running his business empire, Italy and the European Union - he has found time to compose the lyrics for an album of love songs sung by a guitar-playing balladeer called Mariano Apicella. The album, released on CD the week before Putin's visit to Rome, is called Better a Song. Among the immortal lyrics the album contains, composed perhaps with the Russian president in mind, are these: 'With my heart in my mouth/ Because your love is everything to me/I know you may make me suffer/But I'll never let you go/Even if I have to fight/I will love you until the end'.

Italy's 21st-century Renaissance Man made his first serious bundle, and acquired his first private jet, in his mid-thirties, following the completion of his first construction project. A short man who thinks big, Berlusconi did not limit himself to your regular residential complex, or run-of-the-mill skyscraper. He built a town of 4,000 units on a swamp outside Milan, which, with characteristically brash immodesty, he christened Milano Due - Milan Two. He conceived the plan at the tender age of 27. He raised the money, well, no one quite seems to know where he raised the money, although inevitably in Italy there are unproved suspicions that the Mafia played an important part in kick-starting the Berlusconi business empire.

The profits from Milano Due went into starting his advertising agency, Publitalia, an entirely natural move for a man whose quintessential attribute, all observers agree, is that he is a brilliant salesman. Publitalia, the most successful selling machine in Italy, has remained from the beginning the beating heart of his sensationally successful commercial and political operations. Starting with television, and his company Mediaset, which today owns three of Italy's four terrestrial private TV channels; and ending with his political party, Forza Italia, whose image and message were created by Publitalia and subtly tailored to the requirements of each part of the country by the company's network of regional offices, located in every significantly sized town in Italy. Thanks to the miracle of advertising, Forza Italia was founded in January 1994 and by March the party was in power, with Berlusconi as prime minister - 50 of the Forza Italia deputies elected to parliament in that election were employees of Publitalia.

Renato Brunetta, one of Berlusconi's chief political strategists and economic advisers at Forza Italia, says that the way Berlusconi built his TV empire offers a large clue to the secret of his success. 'Berlusconi arrived in private TV after all the historically big entrepreneurs of Italy had tried to make a go of it and failed,' says Brunetta, speaking in his office at Forza Italia headquarters on Humility Street (Via dell'Umilta') in central Rome. Among the companies that had failed to cut it in the TV world were Fiat, whose late chairman Gianni Agnelli used to describe Berlusconi as 'the man with the pancake make-up'. Pancake or not, Brunetta continues, 'what Berlusconi did was what he always does. He cut to the core. He is not a "refinatto" analyser, not a man who turns things over in his head round and round. He goes straight to basic principles. So he asked himself the question, "What is the point of the TV business?" The point is, he said, to sell advertising at a national level.'

Berlusconi's problem was that at that time, in the Seventies, private TV was only allowed to operate in Italy at local level. 'So what he did next, having identified the core objective,' Brunetta says, 'was to invest all his energy and imagination in achieving it. His solution was to create a virtual national TV station.' What he did was broadcast the same programmes on local TV stations he owned all over the country at exactly the same times. 'The idea was pure genius. Through synchronising countless local stations nationwide he was able to compete in advertising revenue with the state broadcaster, RAI.'

In the Eighties, Berlusconi expanded into publishing. Again, he arrived late; again, his company, Mondadori, swiftly became the country's biggest publisher. So promiscuously extensive is the business that Mondadori actually publishes the majority of books critical of Berlusconi himself.

'It's not masochism, it's the market!' enthuses Brunetta, an economics academic whom Berlusconi defers to as 'professore' in their weekly meetings. 'Berlusconi is a pure businessman. For him, the free market is king.'

Just how pure is, of course, a moot point. Too pure, at one level, in the eyes of his most savage Italian critic, the magnificently named editor of the left-wing newspaper l'Unit, Furio Colombo. 'A normal person who goes into the television business does so with the dream of improving the content of the programming, but this was the very last thing in Berlusconi's mind,' says Colombo. 'For him, TV is exclusively a medium to make money, a large advertising mine to be tapped. Programmes are space to fill in between ads. We have maybe the worst TV in Europe. It is utterly vulgar. But no problem, because for Berlusconi it is a money-making formula.'

Berlusconi's TV channels very possibly are the worst in Europe, especially for a man of taste such as Colombo, a silver-haired sophisticate who spent a good part of his life as Gianni Agnelli's New York-based chief representative in the United States. Indeed, if diligently researched news documentaries or well-scripted costume dramas are what you are after, then don't waste your time channel-surfing Mediaset. What Mediaset did provide from the start were popular American soaps such as Dallas, which Italian viewers, raised on RAI's relentless stodge, gleefully embraced, as well as some spectacularly successful home-grown innovations such as quiz shows in which the attractive young female competitors who lost ended up on stage naked.

A well-known public figure in Italy who asked to remain anonymous says that while she was no friend of Berlusconi, one had to acknowledge that he had the popular touch, which she identifies as the key factor in his volcanic political rise. 'His vulgarity is the nation's vulgarity,' she says. 'The left rages against him, but in large measure out of frustration, because the terrible truth of which Berlusconi reminds them is that they have lost touch with the people, they have become elitist. Berlusconi knows much better than any left-wing intellectual what ordinary Italians want to see on television. He knows that what they really want to see is naked women.' In fact, Berlusconi spotted his second wife, Veronica in 1990, performing in a play described at the time by an Italian newspaper (perhaps one of Berlusconi's) as 'a topless classic'.

Others in the media world may be accused of dumbing down. Berlusconi does not need to dumb down. He does not patronise the masses; he does not talk down to them. He is, for better or for worse, one of them. As a pure-hearted journalist of the left lamented: 'When Berlusconi makes what many of us take to be disgusting, outrageous comments he is really giving voice to the views of the 20m Italians who voted for him. When he says - as he did after 11 September - that Muslims are an inferior culture; when he says Mussolini was not so bad; when he says Europe should be declared a Christian area; when he makes jokes comparing German politicians to Nazi prison-camp commanders - when he says all of these things he is simply expressing the ignorant, superficial, narrow, incurious about the outside world views of many, many Italians.'

And not just Italians, the journalist - a much-travelled man - might well have added. Berlusconi, unlike other politicians who paint pictures of the world as they would like it to be, relates to the world as it is. Specifically to his Italian world. 'He is a delinquent,' says the well-known public figure who does not want to be quoted by name. 'But then, so are the people who vote for him. They all cheat on their taxes, they all flout the rules and defraud the system in one way or another.'

The various charges brought against Berlusconi, courtesy of a chart published in The Economist, are these: illegal financing of political parties, tax fraud, false accounting, bribing financial police and bribing judges. One way or another, despite nine separate trials, he has managed to wriggle his way out of trouble. Either he has found succour in the statute of limitations or in amendments to laws that he himself, as prime minister, has championed. Only one case is pending. It concerns the alleged bribery of judges in a matter involving the sale of a state-owned biscuit company.

'Berlusconi is a man with a lot of skeletons in his cupboard,' says Giuliano Ferrara, a minister in Berlusconi's first government and, to this day, one of his closest confidants. 'But it is also true that the public prosecutors are very biased against him.' They were biased against him, or legitimately gunning for him (depending on your point of view) in part because of his close friendship with former Socialist Party prime minister Bettino Craxi, a man identified by a sort of moral revolution that swept the Italian judiciary in the early Nineties - Mani Pulite, or Clean Hands, they called it - as the epitome of the corruption at the heart of the Italian political system.

Craxi, who was godfather to one of Berlusconi's daughters, is credited with having whipped a decree through the Italian parliament in 1984 that allowed Berlusconi's Mediaset to go fully national. When Mani Pulite struck - indicting 900 politicians, civil servants and businessmen - Craxi, the judges' most treasured prize, fled to Tunisia, where he died in exile.

Craxi was Berlusconi's most valued political patron. Indeed, it was Craxi who bestowed on Berlusconi the honorific title of 'Cavaliere', Italy's republican equivalent of a knighthood. It was the least of the favours Craxi did him. No one would try to pretend that Craxi did not contribute significantly to building the Berlusconi fortune. Certainly not Ferrara, who meets with Berlusconi at least once a week and is today the editor of Il Foglio, a newspaper owned by the Berlusconi family. 'We all know we live in a country where fortunes can only be built on political grounds, on the back of alliances,' Ferrara says. 'Berlusconi, as a very successful TV businessman, was very well connected politically, and friends with Craxi. When Craxi was made the great scapegoat, Berlusconi felt he was next. And that is initially why he got into power. He had to do it to save himself.'

Until the legal waters started rising up to his neck, going into politics was the last thing on Berlusconi's mind. As Brunetta, Berlusconi's 'professore' at Forza Italia says, 'When I first met him in the early Nineties it was clear that he was a businessman through and through, with no interest in politics whatsoever.' It is, once again, a tribute to Berlusconi's talent that he identified the problem - 'I am in legal trouble because I have no more political patrons left' - then identified the solution - 'The only thing for it is for me to become my own political patron' - and then set about with extraordinary vigour and single-mindedness to found a political party, lead it and, in barely two months, become prime minister of Italy.

The coalition on which his first government was built fell apart after eight months, but while he had to wait until May 2001 to resume the prime ministership, his power as head of what remained during this time - Italy's biggest parliamentary party - remained considerable, allowing him, for example, to protect himself against attempts to encroach on his virtual monopoly of private TV. But his primary purpose in holding political power, as Ferrara points out, was to shield himself from the law. Whereupon he set about decriminalising several of the offences of which he was accused. Most spectacularly, last year his government passed a law that provided Berlusconi and five other high-ranking members of government with immunity against prosecution so long as they held office.

'Similar immunity laws are in place in France and Spain,' Ferrara shrugs. 'As for some of the other laws, they helped him, but they were valid for all.' The abolition of inheritance tax, one of his first measures on coming to office, was a case in point. It pleased all those who voted for him, but, Berlusconi being the richest man in Italy, it pleased his family best of all. He has passed laws that have given his companies huge tax write-offs. Last month, the Italian president, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, shocked Berlusconi by refusing to sign a bill that would have further relaxed limits on media ownership as well as protect one of his family's TV stations, which under the present law is threatened by closure.

A setback, this, but not a disaster. A few days later Berlusconi's cabinet issued a decree providing Mediaset channel Rete 4 with the cover required to continue operating. As for the controversial bill, which would allow Berlusconi not only to consolidate his TV interests but expand his interests in print, the president will be obliged to sign it if the Italian parliament approves it a second time. Berlusconi's deputy prime minister, Gianfranco Fini, said he was convinced the bill would be returned to Ciampi for rubber stamping; whereupon - at least, this is the word in journalistic circles - Berlusconi will be free to pursue his ultimate aim, to acquire Italy's most respected and venerable newspaper, Corriere della Sera.

All of which suggests that if Italy were not already a member of the European Union it would struggle, so long as Berlusconi were in power, to meet the democratic criteria necessary to be admitted. Indeed, the European parliament, alarmed by Berlusconi's conflicts of interest, ordered an inquiry in October into freedom of expression in Italy. Furio Colombo has no doubt as to what the inquiry's findings should be. 'Berlusconi being prime minister represents an immense act of intimidation against all journalists, most of whom in Italy want eventually to go into television, because everybody knows that what you write and say may impact on your career.' Just in case anyone should have failed to get the message, Berlusconi has seen to it that examples are made of journalists who go beyond what he considers to be the boundaries of acceptable criticism.

The most celebrated case was that of Enzo Biagi, the most respected of Italian TV journalists. On the eve of the 2001 election, Biagi interviewed Roberto Benigni, the great Italian comic actor, star of the Oscar-winning film Life is Beautiful. As Colombo remembers it, Biagi asked Benigni what he thought of Berlusconi, whereupon Benigni started laughing, and laughing, and laughing in a manner so madly infectious that Biagi could not help but join in. Nor could Biagi restrain himself when Benigni set off on one of his trademark stream-of-consciousness monologues.

'Who is Berlusconi?' began Benigni. 'He is someone who always wants to be in on the act. He wants to be everywhere. He wants to be the star. There's a meeting, he talks. He goes to a wedding, he wants to be the bridegroom. He goes to a funeral, he wants to be the deceased.'

Biagi cracked up. The programme he was presenting, a five-minute interview and commentary programme called Il Fatto (The Event), had been broadcast since 1995. Despite Benigni's jokes, Berlusconi won the election, but he never forgave Biagi, claiming he had deliberately sought to turn voters against him. A year later, in April 2002, while on an official visit to Bulgaria, Berlusconi took his revenge. Publicly accusing Biagi and another RAI journalist of putting public television 'to criminal use', he urged RAI's management to take measures to prevent such abuses from happening again. Within two months Biagi and Il Fatto had been taken off the air, and were never to reappear on RAI again.

Even Berlusconi's best friends thought that this was too much. Ferrara wrote a column in his paper accusing him of abusing his power. Colombo goes a lot further. Claiming that RAI's subservience to Berlusconi effectively gives him control of 90 per cent of Italian TV, Colombo says Berlusconi exercises the most sinister influence over Italians' thought processes. 'He controls information so that people think what he wants them to think. Mussolini used tanks. Berlusconi uses his control of the media.'

You have to wonder, though. While there may be much truth in the contention that in the Italian media arena Berlusconi fills the role both of player and referee, is it also true to say that Italians are so easily manipulated, so gullible? After all, if there is one group of people in the world who were most definitely not born yesterday, it is the Italians. The really interesting thing, surely, is not that people vote for Berlusconi in such huge numbers because they have been reduced to sheep, but that they do so in the full possession of their faculties. It is not as if the opposition parties made some sort of a perverse pact to remain silent on Berlusconi's sins during the election campaign. On the contrary. 'He won the elections,' says Ferrara, 'despite the Italian public knowing everything about his conflicts of interest and his judicial problems.'

They know, as Benigni reminded them, and as Ferrara cheerfully admits, that Berlusconi is a 'megalomaniac' (though, as Ferrara maintains, a pleasingly self-deprecating one in private). They know he is - again, in Ferrara's term - a 'gaffeur'. They know, from his cheesy love songs, that he is something of a clown. They know he is corrupt, because they know you cannot make that much money in business in Italy without being corrupt. They know, to borrow John Dryden's description of a contemporary 17th-century politician, that 'in the course of one revolving moon, he was chymist [sic], fiddler, statesman and buffoon'. And yet 20m Italians have voted for him - twice. And may do so again. For all the belly-aching of the Italian left, and of The Economist, and of right-thinking politicians in Germany, Finland and Sweden, there is nothing resembling a national clamour for his removal from office. No riots, no street demonstrations. And while half of Italy may be against him, as half of America is against George Bush, there is no reason to believe he will not be elected again next time, should he still feel the legal pressure to stand.

So what is it all about? Could it be that Berlusconi has some redeeming features? Those who know him, like Brunetta, say that he is cheerfully egalitarian in his treatment of people, be they his chefs, secretaries or cabinet ministers. They say he works hard, that he exudes an all-American optimism in everything he does, that he is not the paranoid tycoon type, rather he is a team man who likes to make people around him rich, so long as they work for the furtherance of his glory. He is also, his advisers insist, a remarkably good listener, who takes notes as they talk. And, obviously, he is a mightily astute self-made man.

One of Berlusconi's greatest attributes, as far as the general public is concerned, may be his bare-faced honesty. As Ferrara says, no one will ever accuse him of being a natural-born politician, a man who chooses his words carefully, who knows how to be economical with the truth.

Tana de Zulueta, a senator of the Democratic Left party and one of Berlusconi's most vociferous critics, says that his gaffes in the Rome press conference with Putin provided further evidence of 'his diabolical mixture of ignorance - he does not read the dossiers because he is simply not interested in the business of government - and his slightly demented exhibitionist streak.' And, yes indeed, he may be a mildly bonkers egomaniac, he may be the single most corrupt politician in Europe, but he has never purported to be a whiter-than-white Tony Blair type. During the day of that famous session at the European parliament when he compared the German politician to a Nazi, he let slip a quite remarkable little nugget. Pressed by a critic who suggested that back home he was passing laws that served his own interests, Berlusconi indignantly replied that out of 350 laws his government had proposed, 'only three' had been 'in a certain sense' for his own benefit. Terribly shocking, this, to Protestant European sensibilities, of course, but is it really much worse than President Bush passing laws that cut taxes for his rich election campaign donors, that do favours to his old buddies in the oil industry?

Take another example, Berlusconi's response to the question why his government supported the war in Iraq. None of the convoluted arguments employed by Mr Blair; no sexing up of dossiers; no claims that Italy was under imminent threat of nuclear attack. As Brunetta says of him, he is a simplifier who cuts straight to the point. I supported the war in Iraq because that is what the Americans wanted me to do, is what he says. More specifically, this is what he told The Spectator in an interview in the summer: 'If a brother goes into a certain business and for three months I say, "I beg you not to do it", and when he does it - well, he is my brother, and I support him, even if not to the point of paying for all his losses! And I have done the same thing with the US. We are alive today because of the US and it was the US who liberated us from Nazism and Communism and supported our economic growth.'

In other words, Berlusconi is America's poodle. Unlike others, he does not pretend that he isn't. Whatever else you may say about him, he is not a hypocrite. He does mention the war; he says what he really thinks about Muslims and Christians (one wonders if Bush does). He is so sensationally uninhibited, in fact, that he makes no bones about repeating the widespread rumour that his topless actress wife, Veronica Lario, is having an affair with Massimo Cacciari, a Marxist philosopher and former mayor of Venice. Thus it was that a year ago he introduced the Danish prime minister, who was visiting Rome, as 'Anders Rasmussen, the best-looking prime minister in Europe', remarking that he and Veronica really ought to meet. Rasmussen, after all, was so much better looking than Cacciari.

If Italians vote for him it must be, in the end, because they like him. Because they see much of themselves in him. His disregard for the rules; the importance he attaches to cutting a bella figura; his unabashed cynicism (as per his relationship with the transparently amoral Putin); and a sense, detectable too from a distance that, like most Italians, he sucked in an understanding of life's comic futility with his mother's milk.

If every day on your way to work you drive - or in previous centuries, rode or walked - past the Colosseum, past that monumental ruin of an empire that once bestrode the known world, then it is impossible not to be possessed of a keen sense of irony; of an understanding that everything passes, nothing lasts and there is nothing new under the sun. A point Ferrara makes is that Italians have nothing remotely equivalent to the veneration Americans feel for the White House, the British (or at least a good number of them) for the monarchy, the Spanish for the hidalgo concept of nobility. Nothing beyond the inner circle of family and close friends is sacred.

Foreigners visiting Italy can sense it in the languid condescension with which they are regarded by the natives, the world-weary amusement. Which is hardly surprising if, never mind the rise and fall of the Roman empire, your country has been subjected to pillage, slaughter and rape for one generation after the next for 16 centuries. The inevitable outcome is that you attach no faith to your country's rulers. They have never protected you from the barbarian hordes. You try, in fact, to keep government as far removed from your life as possible, because insofar as they have been able to, they have pillaged you, too. 'Piove; governo ladro,' the Italians say. 'It rains; the government steals.' So what else is new? At least Berlusconi does not seriously try to make out that he is somehow different, that he is possessed of a superior virtue. To play the fool: that is OK. We all get the joke. And even if sometimes it is not very funny, if there is something a little operatically embarrassing about him, what does it matter, really?

Central government in Italy feels far away. If Berlusconi makes a fool of himself, it is his business; it is not as if anyone imagines he is the incarnation of the Italian people. People vote for him - insofar as they think about it very much, which most Italians do not - because they admire his success and because he is like many of them, only more so. He is not just Italian, he is Italianissimo. Some may think, as he does of the Muslims, that the Berlusconi phenomenon reveals Italy to be an inferior civilisation. Some will say the precise opposite. Either way, don't expect the man on the Colosseum omnibus to be particularly fussed.