Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 13 August 2015

Tony Blair’s cavorting with a right-wing billionaire mired in scandal epitomises what the Labour party is now trying to leave behind

I’m going off Jeremy Corbyn. He seems more and more pleased with himself by the minute. But I understand why he is so popular with Labour supporters. It isn’t just his perceived authenticity in a field of machine politicians — the same attribute that has thrust Donald Trump to the fore in the race for the Republican nomination in the United States. It is something of which I have been reminded this week by the news that Silvio Berlusconi is planning to sell his preposterous Sardinian villa to a Saudi prince, and this is the shame felt by so many party members over their long servility to Tony Blair. For perhaps nothing better exemplifies Blair’s indifference to Labour sensibilities than his visit with Cherie to the Villa Certosa in 2004.

Despite the monastic implications of its name, the Villa Certosa is — to quote a headline from the Times — ‘the ultimate in property porn’. It is a sprawling estate on Sardinia’s Emerald Coast, with 168 acres of garden, six swimming pools, an amphitheatre, an artificial volcano, and direct access by tunnel to the sea. But despite the kind of security that would appeal to the Saudi royal family, this didn’t prevent one enterprising paparazzo from taking photos of a large number of scantily clad girls at one of Berlusconi’s ‘bunga bunga’ entertainments. The pictures included a remarkable one of a former Czech prime minister, Mirek Topolánek, completely naked and in a state of sexual arousal.

Berlusconi, Italy’s longest-serving prime minister since Mussolini, was choosy about who he invited to the Villa Certosa (unless, that is, they were teenage models). Among foreign leaders, he would invite only those he regarded as his personal ‘friends’, such as George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin.

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