He’s back

My Way: Berlusconi in His Own Words. By Alan Friedman. Biteback; 300 pages; £20.

THE subtitle of Alan Friedman’s new book on Silvio Berlusconi is misleading. Mr Friedman was granted unrivalled access to his subject: “over 100 hours of meetings, videotaped interviews and conversations”. Yet Mr Berlusconi’s words comprise but a fraction of the text. The rest is Mr Friedman, plus a team of “editorial staff, researchers and fact-checkers”. The writing of Mr Berlusconi’s authorised biography, for that is what it is, seems to have been an enterprise of appropriately extravagant proportions.

The author, formerly a Financial Times correspondent in Mr Berlusconi’s native Milan, says he warned his subject that the book would not be a hagiography. And the author takes care to balance the magnate-turned-politician’s account of his life with other versions. He quotes extensively the former prime minister, his associates and others with whom Mr Berlusconi came into generally friendly contact, but any alternative narrative of his life is made to seem questionable.

Those who have crossed Mr Berlusconi, or failed to do his bidding, are consistently discredited. Thus his second wife, Veronica Lario, up in arms about her husband’s flirting with other women in public, “appeared ‘shocked’ at his behaviour, as though she had only now seen ‘the real’ Berlusconi”. For Mr Friedman, the former president, Giorgio Napolitano, who helped oust Mr Berlusconi in 2011, is nothing more than a “cynical former communist”. Mario Monti, who replaced Mr Berlusconi, is merely an “ambitious economist”; Mr Monti’s successor, Enrico Letta, a “political lightweight”.

The author also deals unsatisfactorily with the mystery over who really provided the backing for Mr Berlusconi’s stupendously ambitious and costly early business ventures. Mr Friedman says it came from two main sources. One was the now defunct and ill-famed Banca Rasini, where Mr Berlusconi’s father worked and where, the author acknowledges, several leading Mafiosi had accounts. The other was a Swiss fiduciary trust. Later, Mr Friedman writes, Mr Berlusconi “would face unpleasant questions” about his seed capital, but “would deny any irregularities with vigour and venom”. Really? On November 26th 2002 the then prime minister had every opportunity to do so when questioned on this very subject by prosecutors in Rome. Instead, he availed himself of the right to silence.

“My Way” is recent Italian and European history seen from Mr Berlusconi’s relentlessly self-justificatory standpoint. And sometimes the effect is hilarious. The reader learns that “the moment of greatest pain” for Mr Berlusconi came in 2009 as a result of his wife’s incomprehensible reaction to the fact that he had “attended a birthday party for a pretty and lithe 18-year-old lingerie model”. Then there is the tricky matter of the conviction for Mafia collusion of Marcello Dell’Utri, who worked shoulder to shoulder with Mr Berlusconi for most of his career. When in 2014 the verdict came in, Mr Dell’Utri had “disappeared to Beirut for what he would later claim was heart treatment”.

The most illuminating passages highlight just how awful relations were between Mr Berlusconi and his European counterparts as the euro crisis deepened and the others came to see him as a liability. Nicolas Sarkozy, then president of France, refused to shake his hand. America’s treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, is quoted as saying he was approached for help in ousting Mr Berlusconi from office.

“In no other Western country has one national leader so dominated a country’s life or stamped his own personality and tastes on its culture so completely,” Mr Friedman writes. He is right. Yet, in the end, what shines through most in “My Way” is the utter inconsequentiality of Mr Berlusconi’s political and diplomatic legacy. He failed in his dream of uniting the Italian right. His only significant international role was as a covert means of communication between Washington and his more unsavoury friends, like Muammar Qaddafi.

Understandably, the author does not even mention the economic record of the man who entered politics promising a “new Italian miracle”. By 2011, when Mr Berlusconi left office after a decade in which he had governed his country for all but two years, Italians were on average poorer in real terms than they had been ten years earlier.