‘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.
Lario was provoked beyond endurance by Berlusconi’s attendance – bearing a gold and diamond necklace – at the 18th birthday party of a lingerie model who called him “Papi”. Lario told reporters: “I cannot be with a man who cavorts with minors.”
If Blair, in the pre-#MeToo years, hadn’t noticed that well-publicised scandal, his old helpmeet, Alastair Campbell certainly had, to the point of appointing himself agony aunt to Berlusconi, with hints on escaping, as Clinton had done, the harsher consequences of satyrism. “He could do worse,” Campbell advised, “than adopt that same calm approach as Bill Clinton. Objective. Strategy. Tactics.”
Given it’s now also been forgotten, maybe Blair was wise not to let the 2009 perjury conviction of David Mills (the husband of his then cabinet minister, Tessa Jowell) influence his assessment of Berlusconi – someone he described only, in his book, as having “controversy around them”. Mills was found to have withheld incriminating testimony to help Berlusconi in a corruption trial, and sentenced to four and a half years in jail, though this was later quashed on a technicality. The statute of limitations also ensured that Berlusconi escaped a conviction for bribery. In any case, Blair was grateful. Berlusconi had supported him in both the invasion of Iraq and the UK’s bid for the Olympics. “At all levels,” Blair wrote, “politics is about people. If you like a leader, you try to help them.”
Even, it turns out, after death. Last week Blair added his tribute to those of fellow Berlusconi fans Vladimir Putin, George Bush and Viktor Orbán, in terms suggesting that Berlusconi’s reputation should rightfully survive further evidence, post-2010, of priapism, corruption, tax dodging, incompetence.
“Silvio was a larger-than-life figure,” Blair said. “I know he was controversial for many but for me he was a leader whom I found capable, shrewd and, most important, true to his word.”
“For me.” Good to know. We can feel confident that Berlusconi never groped Tony’s wife, perved over his daughter or dismissed his colleagues as menopausal. Even allowing for funeral tact – de mortuis, nil mention of prostitutes – that temporarily forbids allusions to Berlusconi’s most sordid achievements, it is a strikingly generous way for a progressive leader to depict a less principled one’s dedication to sexual gratification, along with his reliance on television channels that continually demeaned women. It’s not as if the world was waiting for Blair to advertise how little he cared about Angela Merkel being called an “unfuckable lard-arse”. Or more recently, Berlusconi promising his football team, Monza, “a bus of whores”.
Not that Blair is alone in indifference to behaviour that once provoked women’s petitions, a complaint (about his insulting language) taken by two MPs to the European court of human rights, a documentary exposing the use of women on Italian television (dominated by Berlusconi) predominantly as sex objects, and in 2011, a demonstration by more than 100,000 women and their supporters against the “degrading” view of women fostered by Berlusconi, a keen user of escorts. The same year, Italian women were revealed to be the unhappiest in Europe. “If your only information about female people came from Berlusconi’s channels,” Ariel Levy wrote that year, for the New Yorker, “you would likely conclude that they exist specifically to be sexually humiliated in public.”
In fact, given his own sexual boasts and unimpressive record in promoting women during the years of his and Campbell’s double act, Blair’s esteem is probably less disturbing than Berlusconi’s depiction last week, in news sources that would probably not use similar language about a non-philandering version of the late billionaire, as “swashbuckling”, “colourful”, “buccaneering”, “flamboyant”, “raunchy”, a “force of nature” prone to “dalliance” (ie, more or less any antiquated compliment that would never be applied to a female politician). As opposed to the more plausible “sad”, “repulsive”, “desperate”, “creepy”, “smaller than life”, prone to “leering”. Awed accounts of the orgies (with nun outfits!) to which he treated himself, created an impression – in contrast to weary comments from his old adversaries, Italian feminists – that would have surely delighted their hero: that the activities of the 86-year-old (whose most recent partner is now 33) are still considered more Casanova, or at worst, Carry On, than a persistent, dehumanising use of wealth and power.
Even in Italy, where Berlusconi’s supporters have responded furiously to critics of the state mourning, Rosy Bindi, a politician who was once publicly insulted by Berlusconi in a television debate, has argued for some balance: “Death doesn’t naturally erase people’s lives.” “I believe he certainly contributed to change Italy,” she says, “but certainly not for the better.”
Likewise the Italian feminist Laura Onofri, for whom the number of politicians and commentators praising Berlusconi has, she writes, “truly exceeded the limit of decency”. Berlusconi’s greatest fault, she suggests, was his promotion on television of a “sexist, macho and patriarchal culture”, along with conduct “that not only made us ridiculous in the eyes of the world, but legitimised behaviour harmful to women’s dignity”.
If Britain had not also rewarded an incontinent shagger who made the country globally ridiculous, reports in which Berlusconi’s usage of women is repeatedly euphemised as dashing would still not suggest a culture significantly advanced. Whatever prevents a Johnson comeback, it will not be his pattern of workplace liaisons with women even Berlusconi might have considered young enough to apply.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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