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

One day Silvio came along and found they had flattened the trees, in a 50-metre radius, to make a helicopter pad. He didn't want a helicopter pad. He was devastated. He went to sleep on Easter night, wrestling with the problem. 'At a certain point I decided that out of each evil you must find a good thing. I thought I could create a labyrinth, and then I decided to make something which had never existed before – a museum of cacti!' We dismount and admire this bizarre amphitheatre in which an audience of 4,000 prickly customers, comprising 400 species from seven countries, looks down from circular terraces on to a beautiful blue pool facing out to the bay. It is cracked but somehow brilliant.

'This is the brain of my finance minister,' says Silvio, pointing to a thing looking like a wrathful artichoke, 'ideas everywhere.' He caresses the powdery flanks of another plant to show its ingenious defence against climbing ants. 'And this,' he says, pointing to a villainous set of spines, 'is the mother-in-law's cushion. This rock came from Lanzarote!' Why did it come from Lanzarote? Was it really essential, this red pumice? Perhaps not: but it showed that Silvio could move mountains.

He has certainly moved Farrell, who is evincing signs of rapture. 'Bravo, Signor Presidente', says the biographer of Mussolini. 'Veramente bravo!'

Berlusconi waves aside our enthusiasm but cannot resist the moral. 'See,' he says, 'this is what the private sector can do! I did this! I did it in three months!' I did this: the boast of every alpha male. Thus the three-year-old to his doting mother; thus Agrippa on the frieze of the Pantheon.