Cover Story

Forza Berlusconi!

6 September 2003

The embattled Italian Prime Minister summoned Boris Johnson and Nicholas Farrell to his Sardinian retreat, and accorded them an insight into his success

For three hours we have been in his presence. We have sat at a table in his drawing-room, Berlusconi at the head, nipples showing through his white Marlon Brando pyjama-suit, and from time to time that table has been pounded vigorously enough to shake the glass bibelots and naked female figurines that dot the room. We have drunk pints of sweet iced tea, brought silently and unprompted, as he has outlined his robust, neo-conservative view of the world. At one stage, after about an hour, the Prime Minister has vanished into the kitchen himself, and caused the appearance of three plates of vanilla and pistachio ice-cream, as if to refuel his torrential loquacity. We have heard him extol Thatcher, praise Blair ('I have never known us to disagree on anything'), laud Bush and damn the Italian magistracy as 'anthropologically diverse from the rest of humanity'.

It has been, says Valentino, his charming interpreter, the most detailed and generous interview that the leader has ever given, and by 7 p.m. Farrell and I are feeling, frankly, a bit limp. But there is no stopping the balding, beaming, bouncing multi-billionaire. He had a brush with cancer a couple of years ago; his skin is a little sallow for a man who has spent August in Sardinia; he looks less like a million dollars than a million lire. But he is the fizziest old dog you have ever seen. 'Facciamo un giro,' he says, by which he means, let's go for a ride.

When Berlusconi takes the wheel of a golf buggy, he does not trundle: he prefers to whang it and weave it down the swept paths of his estate, like Niki Lauda on the Monza hairpin. And as his passengers sway like sea anenomes, he gestures at a landscape which is, of course, naturally lovely, with the sun setting and the Tyrrhenian sea turning from indigo to faded denim. But everywhere he sees signs of his own handiwork and everything seems somehow the product of his own imagination. 'There,' he says, pointing to a bank of blue plumbago. 'This is the flower of Forza Italia. The flower doesn't know it, but I know it.'