Umberto Bossi, the leader and founder of the Northern League, the populist Italian political party, who has died aged 84, was among the oddest characters to strut the European political stage. He was one of the few continental politicians of his time ready to deploy xenophobia in the hunt for votes. But he was also one of the few of any time who could claim not just to have created a successful party, but also to have devised an original ideology to go with it. He could even be credited with inventing a “country” – Padania, his name for the swathe of northern Italy he wanted, at different times, to make either independent or autonomous.
Above all, though, Bossi was outrageous, in or out of office. On the hustings in his early days, he would convey his lust for power to the crowd by growling: “I’ve got a hard-on”. During a period of a few months between 2002 and 2003, while a minister in Silvio Berlusconi’s second government, Bossi mocked the ailing Pope John Paul II, accused the leaders of the European Union of being “pigs” who wanted to “make paedophilia as easy as possible”, denounced “thieving monsignors and cardinals” and called for the Italian navy to fire on boats carrying illegal migrants. “I want to hear the roar of cannon,” he told an astonished interviewer. “After the second or third warning, ‘Boom’. ‘Fire!’”
