Berlusconi: Immunity Stripped

Having talked about Silvio Berlusconi occasionally (in these posts, Busted! and Dinosaur) he has become a source of constant fascination for me.

Call him a dinosaur (I did), a racist, a buffoon and an anachronistic old tool as much as you like but, you have to hand it to him, he’s a one man, walking soap opera.

They'll never make it stand up in court

This time Italy’s Constitutional Court has thrown out a law passed by Berlusconi’s government which had been designed to give him immunity from prosecution while he remained Prime Minister. The move could lead to the corruption charges, which had been halted by the law, being reinstated.

Berlusconi has not taken the news well but has lost none of his magnificent bluster…

We have to govern for five years with or without the law . . . these things just wind me up. We move on, move forward. Viva l’Italia, viva Berlusconi!

He has also been quoted as saying…

I am, and not only in my own opinion, the best prime minister who could be found today. I believe there is no one in history to whom I should feel inferior. Quite the opposite.

Perhaps it’s wrong of me but I am beginning to find his self-glorification rather endearing, principally because it is self-delusion on an awe-inspiringly, magnificent scale. And it is the sheer size of that scale that makes his clangers ring with a volume probably unmatched since Boris Yeltsin spent part of his state visit to the US wandering outside White House, shit-faced drunk in his underpants, trying to hail a taxi to go and get pizza.

Here is my most recent favourite. If you are Italy’s wealthiest man and on the verge of corruption charges perhaps you may wish to avoid a Freudian slip of this magnitude Sir…

In absolute terms, I am the most legally persecuted man of all times, in the whole history of mankind, worldwide, because I have been subjected to more than 2,500 court hearings and I have the good luck – having worked well in the past and having accumulated an important wealth – to have been able to spend more than €200m in consultants and judges … I mean in consultants and lawyers.

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