Silvio Berlusconi: A study in failure

Silvio Berlusconi

Silvio Berlusconi

A study in failure

James L. Newell

Manchester University Press

Copyright © James L. Newell 2019

The right of James L. Newell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

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ISBN 978 0 71907597 1 hardback

First published 2019

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Contents

List of figures

List of tables

Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction: a remarkable politician?

Part I: Emergence

1  From childhood, through business career to political debut, 1936–93

2  Berlusconi’s political message

Part II: Berlusconi the politician

3  Forza Italia and national politics, 1994–2001

4  Berlusconi the party leader

Part III: Berlusconi the prime minister

5  Berlusconi in office, 2001–11

6  Berlusconi’s relations with the political class

Part IV: Berlusconi’s legacy

7  Berlusconi and cultural change in Italy

8  Berlusconi’s electoral impact

9  Berlusconi as head of government

10  Berlusconi’s legacy for the quality of Italian democracy

Conclusion: the Berlusconi story and Donald Trump

References

Index

Figures

8.1  Centre right’s electoral performance, 1994–2013

10.1  Perceptions of corruption in Italy: CPI scores, 1995–2015

Tables

8.1  Leaders of the two main coalitions, 2001–13

8.2  Vote shares won by parties of the centre right and the centre left, 1994–2013

8.3  Vote shares won by parties of the centre right and the centre left, 1948–92

8.4  Electoral flows, 1992–94

8.5  Electoral flows, 1996–2001 (Chamber plurality arena) and 2001–06

10.1  Attitudes relevant to quality of democracy: Italy, France, UK and Germany, 2012

Preface

Some words about the context, personal and political, in which this book came to be written will help to make clear how it came to fruition, as well as the assumptions underlying and driving the material it contains. I wanted to write a biography of Berlusconi because he had attracted a volume of foreign media attention and comment unprecedented for an Italian political leader – even the uninitiated among non-Italians I came across seemed to know who Berlusconi was and had a view on him, his notoriety seemingly surpassed only by that of Benito Mussolini himself – and because his role in Italian politics seemed to lie at the heart of the extraordinary political upheavals that took place in Italy following, and directly connected with, the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. These upheavals were unprecedented, political scientists routinely noting that the political transition they set in motion had only one analogue in post-war democratic Europe, namely, the transition in France from the Fourth to the Fifth Republic under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle.

It therefore struck me that a political biography of Berlusconi could potentially make a significant contribution to understanding the trajectory taken by Italian politics since the early 1990s, especially given that the upheavals and transition had brought with them important changes in the meaning, the scope and the role of political leadership. As others had pointed out, party and coalition leaders had acquired crucial – and unprecedented – electoral, political and institutional roles. Election campaigns, which until the 1980s had been entirely party-centred, were now dominated by coalition leaders, their personal characteristics and communication styles. Politically, the choice of leader played a crucial role in enhancing or diminishing the degree of cohesion of the coalition that she or he led. Institutionally, coalition leaders were now prime ministerial candidates playing a much more significant role in shaping their governments than was true of ‘First Republic’ prime ministers who were entirely dependent on post-election balances of power within and between the governing parties. If, then, the roles played by coalition leaders had been of unusually large significance, it was a reasonable conjecture that the processes of change in the political system might have been considerably different had the identity and the characteristics of the individuals occupying the leadership positions been different.

The coalition leader who had had the highest profile was Silvio Berlusconi, who had dominated Italian politics in several ways. As the founder and leader of Forza Italia, the largest party on the centre right, he had been the true promoter – the collant – of his coalition. If he had in this way made a remarkable contribution to the establishment of bipolar competition in Italy, it remained an open question what would happen to the coalition if, and when, he left the political stage. As republican Italy’s longest-serving prime minister and as owner of Italy’s three largest private television stations, he occupied a combination of positions widely held to entail a significant conflict of interests, and this issue had rarely been far from the centre of substantive political debate – either in Italy or in Europe more generally. He had introduced, or at least fuelled, a new style of populist politics in Italy and this, it had been suggested, reflected a wider phenomenon, going well beyond the country’s borders.

Though the project was conceived some years ago, the bulk of the book was not written until 2017; and yet now, at the beginning of January 2018, I am struck by the thought that, as it turned out, 2017 has been a good year in which to write the book, given that I had set myself the task of considering Berlusconi’s legacy: any earlier attempt to do so would have been premature given the extraordinary capacity he has shown to survive misfortunes and to stage comebacks thought by many to be impossible.

He may yet do so again. In 2017 he celebrated his 81st birthday, and though he was still a party leader with a high profile on the Italian political stage, he no longer set the agenda to the extent he had done in the past even in opposition, his role seemingly confined more or less to reacting to initiatives taken by others. But during the second half of the year there were signs of a revival of his political fortunes. Local elections in June saw his party make significant gains in alliance with the Northern League and the right-wing Brothers of Italy; and the Sicilian regional elections on 5 November saw the centre-right coalition of which he was a part emerge victorious, seeing off a significant challenge from the Five-star Movement (M5S) in the process. It seemed unlikely that he would be able once again to become prime minister following the general election due to be held on 4 March 2018; his 2013 conviction for tax fraud had resulted in him being banned from holding public office for six years in accordance with anti-corruption legislation passed in 2012, and although he had challenged the legislation before the European Court of Human Rights in November 2017, most informed commentators did not expect a verdict for at least six months. But despite this, in voting intentions polls his party had regained its pre-eminence on the centre right, having for several months been overtaken by the Northern League, and the polls suggested a growing advantage over the other contenders for the centre-right parties generally.

At the end of 2017, then, some of the assumptions that had been made at the time that most of these chapters were drafted seemed slightly less secure; for, if Berlusconi’s definitive eclipse was less completely certain, then so too was the solidity of the party-political changes of which he had been a leading protagonist. That is, if the future had seemed set to be one of bipolar competition spearheaded by two main prime ministerial contenders, each competing for overall majorities, then at the end of 2017 this was very unclear. The assumption had already been placed in doubt by the explosion in support for the M5S at the general election of 2013; but it remained to be seen whether that party could manage, and survive, the competing pressures of government on the one hand and its role as a protest party on the other. 2016 had seen it take over the reins of government in a number of important municipalities, and notwithstanding periodic accusations of poor judgement on the part of some of its representatives and occasional allegations of improbity on the part of others, it became clear as 2017 progressed that the party was not going to disappear any time soon. As a formation whose appeal is based precisely on popular perceptions of incompetence and dishonesty on the part of mainstream politicians, and on the claim to offer a radical alternative, it might have expected to be especially vulnerable to the charges levelled against it; but people vote for the M5S simply because it represents something different from a political class in whom vast swathes have virtually no confidence. By the end of 2017, then, it was clear that the following year’s election was going to be at least a three-horse race, with no certainty about whether there would be an overall majority for any of them – or any certainty, if that were the case, about what the composition of the resulting government would be.

2017 was, of course, also the year of Donald Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States, and commentators have noted several significant parallels between the cases of Berlusconi and Trump. They are both populists on the right of the political spectrum; they were both elected to office as political outsiders; they are both very wealthy; both have been at the centre of allegations of wrong-doing that have led their opponents to question their fitness for office; they are both flamboyant, larger-than-life characters with a love of flouting established conventions: they have both understood that the race for elected office in the early twenty-first century is a game of marketing – of grabbing media attention by creating a character with whom political consumers (voters) can identify, with their capacity to do this being the greater the more the sense of anger and resentment against conventional politicians can be activated by acts of irreverence – whether through the medium of Twitter or by telling bawdy jokes – designed to convey the message that politicians are, after all, no better than those they claim to represent. Other anti-establishment politicians to have understood this are, of course, Umberto Bossi, Beppe Grillo and Nigel Farage.

Not surprisingly, then, during the final stages of preparation of the manuscript, it was put to me that, in light of the extraordinary rise of Trump, the book would benefit from the addition of some material considering the international, comparative significance of the Berlusconi phenomenon, and especially from a comparison with the US president. I have done this in the concluding chapter.

Doing so has reminded me of the final reason for my interest in Berlusconi’s career, and that is a feeling of mild indignation at the way he is often portrayed in the international media and by academics unsympathetic to him. Let me be clear. I am not sympathetic to him either, though I have tried as best I can to put aside my preconceptions in the writing of this book. The reason for my indignation lies less in the substance of the portrayals – as a man without scruples, willing to abuse the premiership for private gain, as a misogynist unfit for public office etc. – than in what the portrayals – or rather, their unremitting quality – imply, namely, that their purveyors can afford to take the moral high ground and so place beyond scrutiny the manifestations in their own societies of the pathology Berlusconi represents (ultimately, the unchallenged pursuit of wealth and power at other people’s expense). Too often, it seems to me, the accusations levelled at Berlusconi are that he does what he does ‘in the wrong way’ – by confusing public and private – the implication being that the substance of what he and other members of his class do is just fine. Which I would question. So I wanted to produce an analysis of the Berlusconi phenomenon which, besides focusing on its impact on, and legacy for, Italian politics, would also seek to understand it in its own terms, problematising the criticisms and the grounds for them. Obviously, it will be up to the reader to judge how successful I have been.

Abbreviations

Introduction: a remarkable politician?

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. (Marx, 1869 [1852])

Love him or loathe him, Silvio Berlusconi is often thought of as one of Europe’s most remarkable politicians of recent decades. With an estimated wealth of $7.8 billion, he occupied 118th place in Forbes’ list of the world’s richest people when he left office in 2011, and third place among the richest in Italy. He has been his country’s longest-serving post-war prime minister and one of the longest-serving leaders of a major party in Europe: while Margaret Thatcher led the British Conservative Party for just short of sixteen years, for example, Berlusconi has led his party for well over twenty-two. Now 81, he has survived sexual and financial scandals that would have swept other politicians off the political stage long ago.

Early in 1994 he created a seemingly entirely novel kind of political party and then went on, within the space of a few weeks, to win the first of three general elections which, for almost the next two decades, confirmed his role as the fulcrum around which everything of any importance in Italian party politics essentially revolved. On the one hand, he and his party were the pivot around which the centre right was built and whose unity depended almost entirely on his continued popularity. On the other hand, opposition to Berlusconi was the only common denominator of the parties on the centre left – and thus the source of their weakness and division as they each struggled to find a way to oppose him without leaving themselves exposed to the electoral incursions of their allies. In short, it was for long the case that ‘to be on the centre right [meant] to support Berlusconi, to be on the centre left … to oppose him’ (Urbani, 2009).

It is widely understood, then, that in terms of profile, almost all of the period since the early 1990s in Italian politics has been dominated by one man: Silvio Berlusconi. It was only with the outcome of the general election of 2013 that he seemed to lose decisive influence over the trajectory of change in Italian politics, influence which passed to other actors, but even then he seemed not entirely to have become a spent force. Such was his profile during the years of his dominance that the chances were that even non-Italians who knew nothing of the politics of the peninsula were familiar with his name.

Thanks to this, there is a rich Berlusconi literature. There have been several biographies of Berlusconi and a number of accounts of him as a campaigner and of the nature and style of his communications. There have been accounts of his leadership style (e.g. Campus, 2016) and of his use and abuse of power, and debates about how ‘the Berlusconi phenomenon’ should be conceptualised and theorised (e.g. Orsina, 2013). But so far there has not, to my knowledge, been any sustained attempt to address the fundamental question of the extent to which Berlusconi actually made a difference. Simply put, the basic question underlying this study is: from the vantage point of 2017, would Italian political history of the past twenty-five years look substantially different had Berlusconi not had the high-profile and enduring role in it that he did? Of course, ultimately, we can never conclusively answer such a question; but asking it makes it possible, as we shall see, to contribute to a broader debate in recent years concerning the significance of leaders in post-Cold War democratic politics.

Returning, for the time being, to Italian politics, we know that Berlusconi made a significant contribution to the emergence of bipolar party competition in the early 1990s, with all the hopes for a ‘new beginning’ that attended it. But what is not clear is whether his role was that of the ‘eventful man’ or the ‘event-making man’ (Hook, 1945) – in other words, whether, thanks to qualities ‘of a fairly common distribution’, Berlusconi’s actions were decisive only because he happened to be in the right place at the right time, or whether, thanks to unusual qualities, he was able to influence or shape the circumstances themselves. In the former case, the outcome would in all probability have been somewhat similar, even if another had occupied Berlusconi’s place; in the latter case they would have been significantly different.

We know, too, that the period since the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent emergence of the so-called Second Republic has been one in which many of the hopes and expectations that attended the Second Republic’s emergence have been bitterly disappointed. In particular, the two main coalitions – whose alternation in government was supposed to bring greater political accountability and thus significant improvements to the quality of democracy – found it difficult, in the years from 1994 on, to accord each other legitimacy as potential governing actors. They remained highly fragmented, not at all cohesive entities, with the result that though the duration of governments’ tenure of office was on average somewhat longer than the tenure of the governments of the First Republic, executives were hardly more able to dominate Parliament in the interests of decisive policy making than they had been before the 1990s. And the perceived failure of the 1990s upheavals to live up to their promise seemed also to be reflected in a lack of decisive change in a number of areas of substantive policy making or in policy-making outcomes such as economic growth and political corruption. Given Berlusconi’s dominance of Italian politics and his occupation of the premiership for much of the time, a large share of the responsibility for such disappointing outcomes must, presumably, be laid at his door. But again, were they outcomes which in all probability would have been realised anyway, or would they have been significantly different with someone other than Berlusconi in his place?

So whether he was an eventful or an event-making man, a consideration of Berlusconi’s contribution is necessary, and it is all the more necessary now, for reasons of timing; for, since the 2013 general election, his career seems to have entered a new and possibly final phase, one in which he is occupied less frequently in setting the political agenda than in reacting to agendas set by others. Consequently, the time is now right, to an extent that was less true when he was by far and away the most high-profile figure in Italian politics, to consider his legacy, to consider how and why he has changed, or failed to change, Italian politics in the period since his emergence.

This task is essential for two reasons that go beyond the fact that he is a colourful personality who has had a high-profile role. First, it is impossible satisfactorily to explain political change anywhere without giving at least as much weight to the decisions and actions of specific, significantly placed individuals as to groups of people and to processes. True, the so-called ‘great man theory’ of history – according to which our present is to be explained not by structural forces but by the actions of specific ‘great men’ (and women) – is untenable. From this perspective, all other factors in recent Italian political developments save personalities such as Berlusconi, their actions and characteristics, must be deemed inconsequential. It would be readily conceded that to make possible such hugely significant events as – for example – Berlusconi’s success in uniting in coalition the seemingly incompatible parties that won the elections of 1994 and subsequent years, various enabling conditions were necessary. But it would be argued that these enabling conditions must be explained as the work of other outstanding individuals. Now while they will certainly have been the work of individuals, it is by no means certain and perhaps unlikely that they will have been the work of specific individuals, in the sense that without them as opposed to other individuals like them the conditions would never have been realised. So, a priori attempts to make the actions of specific individuals bear the entire weight of historical explanation fail.

But so too do attempts at explanation informed by the opposite position, that is, the position occupied by social determinists for whom the choices of individuals are inconsequential because their actions are determined entirely by social forces – cultural, political, economic etc. – of various kinds. For social determinists, individual choices and actions merely reflect or give expression to these forces which, consequently, are all that need to be referred to in explanations of historical change. This implies that humans’ actions and their consequences are not the product of their reasons and intentions but rather are predetermined – with the difficulty, from the point of view of explanation, that this precludes understanding. In a world in which everything is predetermined and intentions have no effects, attempts to explain a circumstance or event fall victim to the problem of infinite regress – from which a reference to reasons or intentions, divine or otherwise, provides the only possible escape; only they can offer understanding, in the sense of rendering action intelligible, that is, enabling us to imagine ourselves acting similarly were we in the position of the people whose actions we seek to explain. Thus only they can quieten the demand for an answer to the question ‘Why?’ So ultimately, social determinism’s attempt entirely to eliminate human agency is a failure. It too is untenable.

Second, more specifically, an assessment of the Berlusconi legacy is essential thanks to changes in the meaning, the scope and the role of political leadership. These have rendered processes of change in the Italian political system – dominated, from the end of the war until the 1980s, entirely by the parties – much more amenable to the decisions and actions of the individuals occupying leadership positions than they had been previously; cross-national developments combined with the party-system transformation of the early 1990s have given party and coalition leaders unprecedented electoral, political and institutional roles (Pasquino and Campus, 2006).

Cross-nationally, a number of interrelated developments in politics and the media have brought a growing personalisation of politics: a growing focus on, and significance for, individual candidates and their characteristics in determining election outcomes. On the one hand, the decline set in train – some would say, accelerated – by the end of the Cold War of once deep-seated ideological conflicts between left and right has made ideology and policy differences between mainstream parties everywhere harder to identify than in the past. Parties have been obliged increasingly to mark out their distinctiveness by having greater recourse to ‘valence’ issues – and thus increasingly to compete on the basis of being more competent than their rivals – which has in turn concentrated their listeners’ attention on the personal qualities of their candidates. On the other hand, media developments have rendered the lives of the individuals who walk on the public stage ‘much more visible than they ever were in the past’ (Thompson, 2000: 6), giving an added boost to the shift from ‘party-’ to ‘candidate-centred’ campaigning that had taken place thanks to the development of opinion polling (which had given political actors unmediated access to information about voters) and television (which allowed candidates to appeal directly to voters, thus diminishing the requirement for good party organisation and the attention to party itself in campaigns). Against this background, the emergence, in the 1990s, of party-system bipolarity in Italy gave leaders such as Berlusconi unprecedented power and significance.

Election campaigns became dominated by coalition leaders, whose personal characteristics and political styles played the most central role, this thanks to the fact that the leaders were now prime ministerial candidates. If this served to heighten the impact of voters’ assessments of them on their electoral choices, then such heightened impact fed back to communication strategies, raising the profile and the significance of leaders in elections still further. On a wide range of measures, the 1994 and subsequent campaigns have been the most ‘leader-centred’ since the founding of the Republic.

Politically, it has become clear that the choice of leader plays a crucial role in enhancing or diminishing the degree of cohesion of the coalition that she or he leads. For example, one of the most important reasons why, as a general rule, the centre left was less cohesive than the centre right from the start is that centre-left leaders, without a party able to act as a ‘coalition maker’, remained exposed to the pressures of their coalition’s constituent parties – in radical contrast, until recently, to the position of Berlusconi on the centre right.

Institutionally, winning candidates have played a much more crucial role in shaping and managing the tensions within their governments than was ever true of ‘First Republic’ prime ministers, who were entirely dependent for their positions on post-election balances of power within and between parties able to form a governing majority. That is, since prime ministers’ positions, at least until the indecisive 2013 outcome, have tended to be legitimised directly, by the nature of election outcomes themselves, their power and authority vis-à-vis their cabinet colleagues and parliamentary followers have been much enhanced. From having been mediators in the days when they and their cabinet colleagues all owed their positions to party agreements about executive composition only once the distribution of votes was known, they have been closer to being authoritative leaders (even though they have not acquired the capacity to hire and fire and to direct policy that their Westminster counterparts enjoy – at least when they are backed by healthy Commons majorities). And it is likely that the enhanced role of the Italian prime ministers has been self-reinforcing: the more they have been able to provide authoritative leadership, the more this has been expected of them; and the more this has been expected of them, the greater has been their capacity actually to provide it (Hine and Finocchi, 1991).

In short, Italy has fully reflected the situation of democracies in general in recent years in having been subject to a process of ‘presidentialisation’ (Poguntke and Webb, 2005) whereby the growing leader-centredness of elections has, by giving leaders increasingly direct, personal mandates, also given them increasing authority in their parties and – when in office – within executives. If, then, we want to understand the nature of Italian politics, and how and why it has changed in the period since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a consideration of the part played by Berlusconi is indispensable.

Exploring this issue will help to throw light on the extent to which Berlusconi’s reputation as one of Europe’s most remarkable politicians of recent decades is actually deserved. He has been remarkably successful in winning elections, in mobilising support and in hanging on to office against often seemingly incredible odds. But from this it does not necessarily follow that as a political actor he was a novelty or an innovator, as opposed to a mere interpreter of already-present tendencies. Nor does it follow that his political successes had much to do with him personally or that they have had any specific consequences for the political life of Italy. These are questions whose answers cannot be deduced from the evident power and popularity he has enjoyed to varying degrees over the years. And they are important ones to ask for the following reasons.

Some years ago, Richard Rose wrote a book, entitled Do Parties Make a Difference? (1980), asking about the extent and the nature of the impact of parties on the substance of public policy. The matter is one that has spawned a considerable volume of research together with two broad perspectives (Mansergh, 1999: 2): one claiming the prevalence of socio-economic factors in the determination of public policy, the other the prevalence of political factors. But what about individual party leaders? It is noticeable that despite the near consensus surrounding the personalisation, mediatisation and presidentialisation of politics, which would see the power of individual leaders as having been considerably enhanced in recent decades, there is very little discussion and evidence available concerning the extent to which these leaders actually make a difference in the sense that public policy and other political matters are different from what they would have been had it not been for the part played by the leader and his or her actions.

This paucity of interest is surprising given the amount of trust citizens in the advanced democracies apparently place in individual political leaders in the early twenty-first century – growing political disenchantment notwithstanding. Indeed, as the growth of populism suggests, it may be precisely because of growing political disenchantment that people come to place growing trust – or at least hope – in (the claims of) leaders. Of course, there is nothing new about this: charismatic leaders, who by definition engender great trust, are as old as politics itself, as is our fascination with them – though after the tragic consequences of fascination with the Nazi and Fascist leaders responsible for the Second World War, mass publics for many decades oriented themselves to political life using frames and categories from which individual leaders and their qualities were for the most part absent. True, they were certainly not absent in authoritarian and totalitarian regimes with their periodic ‘personality cults’; and they were not entirely absent from liberal democracies or even from the most collectivist of parties – as, for example, the reverence of Italian communists for a leader such as Palmiro Togliatti readily attests. And of course the examples could be multiplied. But generally speaking, people approached politics using categories such as class and religious affiliations, and ones relating to policy and ideology.

Then, from around about the mid-1970s, in a number of European democracies it became apparent that there was growing dissatisfaction with the policy and governing performances of mainstream parties and that, concomitantly, traditional social attachments, to class and to church, were declining in strength. Among citizens, now more critical and better educated thanks to the post-war boom, there were, as boom turned to bust, increasingly widespread expressions of mistrust of politicians and periodic waves of support for new, populist parties with their claims to be, precisely, opposed to established politicians. These, according to the populist credo, had betrayed the interests of ordinary people, with whom populist leaders claimed an especial affiliation. These leaders, so populist thinking went, could meet the needs of ordinary people where the mainstream parties had failed, if they could establish a direct relationship with citizens – thereby mobilising the power of popular support – through an attitude of intolerance towards constitutional constraints and checks and balances that limited the power of the leader to carry out their mission on behalf of the common good. And by implying that election of the party leader was to be equated with the welfare and destiny of the entire nation (Diamond and Gunther, 2001: 28), the populist party generated huge popular expectations of what leaders could potentially achieve.

But it was not just new parties that were raising the profile of individual leaders in political life: the phenomenon was general, as the mediatisation of politics brought more candidate- and leader-centred campaigning on the part of more or less all parties. This resulted in a de facto concentration of political power in the hands of individual leaders as electorates responded to the new campaign styles by apparently giving greater weight to leader profiles in their voting choices, thus making leaders with significant ‘personal’ followings especially powerful vis-à-vis their parties. Berlusconi was the archetype of such a leader.

General cultural changes – including consolidation of the neoliberal consensus, the growth of celebrity culture and identity politics – also played a role in the growing public focus on individual leaders. Since 9/11 and the abrupt end to the initial post-Cold War optimism, financial crisis, growing geopolitical instability, climate change, refugee crises, population ageing, the implications of the information revolution, and widening inequality between classes and generations have all arguably brought growing feelings of powerlessness and pessimism about the future – and a growing temptation to cut through the complexities by pinning one’s hopes on a powerful leader.

There are two broad perspectives on the impact of leaders in politics. One, which can be referred to as the ‘complex politics’ thesis, implies that they have little role, simply because public problems generally are increasingly beyond the control of policy makers, within individual states, to resolve. The other, suggesting an increasingly important role, derives from the ‘presidentialisation’ thesis, which is in turn directly related to, is a variant of, the ‘great man theory’ of history. The relationship is this: clearly leaders make a difference – there is no reason to doubt that leadership is a key feature of government and that power can be exercised in a distinctly individual way. But do they make the difference? This is the question that the ‘great man theory’ claims to answer; and it answers it in the affirmative.

The Italian media magnate offers a particularly good test case for assessing the proposition that leaders can make a difference, and this for two specific reasons. First, his