For Tony Blair, Silvio Berlusconi was shrewd, capable and true to his word. For others, not so much

‘If you like a leader, you try to help them’: Tony Blair as prime minister greeting then Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi at an event in Rome in 2004. Photograph: Filippo Monteforte/EPA

‘I liked Silvio,” Tony Blair wrote in his autobiography. That was in 2010, when there was possibly some excuse.

It was not until 2013 that the late “Silvio” was convicted of tax fraud; charges of false accounting having been dropped after Berlusconi changed the law on false accounting; formal sex charges against him were also yet to come. There were just the two public letters from the second Mrs Berlusconi, Veronica Lario, both denouncing her husband’s pursuit and shameless political promotion of objects of his sexual interest, to suggest that Blair might want to rethink his enthusiasm for a notorious chaser of young women and disrespecter of older ones lest this be mistaken for some sort of endorsement.