“When men are forbidden to honour a king, they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served: deny it food, and it will gobble poison.”

So wrote C.S. Lewis in 1943, part of an essay in The Spectator that lauded the virtues of constitutional monarchy. He would have been proud to see thousands of his countrymen lined up, single file, to see Her Late Majesty lying in the state some eighty years later.

Thousands assembled to honour a millionaire who cavorted with gangsters and prostitutes

By the same token, Lewis would have been appalled by the crowds that gathered outside of Milan Cathedral to mourn Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s longest-serving post-war Prime Minister. Just as he had predicted, thousands assembled to honour a millionaire who spent his time cavorting with gangsters and prostitutes.

Berlusconi’s global legacy is defined by gaffes and scandals. He is perhaps best remembered for his legendary “bunga bunga” parties, secret debauched orgies with prostitutes for which he stood trial in 2013. Throughout his life, he was linked to the shady Propaganda Due masonic lodge, and he is believed to have maintained close ties to the Sicilian mafia. The headlines are not flattering: chauvinist, philanderer, proto-Trump; racist, sexist, elitist.

Yet, whilst accurate, this account is not totally fair. Few outside of Italy know the true Berlusconi. The respect and admiration afforded to Il Cavaliere by millions of Italians is no mass hysteria.

He was, for all intents and purposes, the King of the Italians. Berlusconi was an omnipresent figure, the threads of his influence running through Italian political, media and sporting culture. In the great tradition of Italian kings, he never governed alone, but his presence was always felt. His time in power defined the past thirty years of Italy’s development and coincided with some of the country’s strongest post-war growth.

It is in Berlusconi’s personality that we see his monarchic character most clearly. He was not just a larger-than-life figure — he was a totemic one, 20th century Italy made manifest.

He displayed the generosity, charm and good humour of history’s greatest monarchs. International summits were dominated by his broad, insalubrious grin, and gifts were given with reckless abandon.

Following a 2008 meeting with Brazil’s President Lula, Berlusconi noted that his South American counterpart was impressed by Milan’s fashion pedigree. On returning home to Brasilia, Lula found that he had been gifted fifty of the finest Italian silk ties, with compliments from il primo ministro. Nancy Pelosi fared just as well, receiving a set of silver candlesticks and three silk scarves when Berlusconi visited Washington in 2011.

In equal measure, he was bellicose, arrogant and brash. He famously labelled himself “the Jesus Christ of politics”, picked fights with impunity and pulled no punches with his political opponents.

His life was defined by a high drama and a mammoth personality that set him apart from a generation of grey-suited functionaries and dour civil servants. In amongst the bean-counting Eurocrats and the politicians in Rome who seemed intent on imitating them, Berlusconi was impossible to ignore.

Yet this was not the Italy which birthed Silvio Berlusconi. Amidst the political turmoil of the 1970s, Berlusconi forged a fortune. His first venture was the Milano Due residential complex in the eastern suburbs of Milan, a network of walkable, family-friendly homes. Next came TeleMilano, Italy’s first private television channel, and Fininvest, the country’s first and only commercial media empire.

In his well-fitted suits, the Berlusconi of the 1980s spent his time rubbing shoulders with prime ministers and greasing the wheels of questionable mergers, a younger and more Mediterranean Logan Roy. Yet the arena of business could not contain so large a personality. As the Cold War drew to a close, Berlusconi would enter the political stage.

To understand Berlusconi, you must understand Mani Pulite.

Since the fall of Mussolini, Italian politics had been dominated by the centrist Christian Democracy party. With a broad array of partners from the centre-left to the far-right, Democrazia Cristiana played senior partner in every single one of the country’s post-war coalition governments.

At the height of his power, Berlusconi really did rule as king

Then came Judge Antonio Di Pietro, a young judge who began investigating Milanese politicians and business leaders for corruption and kickbacks in early 1992. Starting with the arrest of Mario Chiesa, a member of the centre-left Socialist Party, Di Pietro and his team investigated corruption amongst over 5,000 officials, including more than half of the members of the Italian Parliament. Investigators uncovered bribes that amassed to an annual value of some $4 billion. Many of the country’s most senior figures were censured, banned from public office or put behind bars. Italy’s political landscape lay in tatters.

Never one to pass up a good crisis, Berlusconi launched a political party, Forza Italia (“Forward Italy”), and burst onto the political scene. Supported by the architecture of Fininvest, Forza positioned itself as pro-business, anti-populist and anti-corruption, making its appeal to moderate voters who felt betrayed by the old parties.

Many in the West remember Berlusconi as a crook; few remember that Italy is still a nation more comfortable with suspect contracts and elaborate political gifts than its northern neighbours. Whilst the old parties furnished their bank accounts with state earnings, Berlusconi’s independent wealth insulated him from this sort of petty corruption. Naturally, his own media companies were afforded remarkable leniency by regulators during his time in office, but for many Italians this was preferable to the old system.

The strategy worked; at the 1994 elections, Berlusconi’s coalition won a clear majority of seats. Whilst his government would fall in a little over a year due to coalition infighting, Berlusconi was a name forever etched onto Italian politics. Forced into opposition in 1995 until an election victory in 2001, he served a second term as Prime Minister until 2006. After another short stint in opposition, he was back again in 2008.

At the height of his power, Berlusconi really did rule as king. During his second term as Prime Minister, he was the richest man in Italy, owned three of the country’s main TV channels, headed its largest publishing company and owned one of its main football clubs. In that time, his governments added nearly a trillion dollars to the Italian economy, built bridges between the West and its traditional enemies, and undertook sweeping reforms to the country’s complex tax system.

His downfall began in 2011. Failure to pass a series of aggressive budget cuts through the Chamber of Deputies saw him tender a resignation. At the 2013 elections, his centre-right coalition lost out badly to the insurgent Five Star Movement. In the same year, he was convicted of tax fraud and banned from public office. For four years, he remained in exile, watching events from afar, muzzled but not yet beaten.

In later life, he manoeuvred again, reinventing himself in the surprise role of elder statesman, the credible straight-man in Italy’s newly insurgent right-wing coalition. He broke bread with old enemies to bring Italy’s Meloni Government to power and moderated the worst excesses of his naïve younger counterparts. His final years revealed a rarely seen wisdom and foresight, forged by decades in politics. He made rare but valuable interventions against Chinese influence in Italy’s economy, also acting in favour of a detente with Arab leaders in order to address the Mediterranean migrant crisis.

Berlusconi the absolute monarch had become Berlusconi the constitutional monarch, quietly influencing events from a position of respectable seniority. He continued to work in front line politics until his death in mid-June 2023.

His legacy will be marked by an inescapable presence across three decades of Italian politics. He boasts a global footprint, a generation of Western populists who imitate his direct style and insouciant approach to democracy. His passing has even sparked rumours of a succession crisis. There are rumours that the leadership of Forza Italia will pass to his eldest daughter Marina or to his son Pier Silvio. Perhaps in time, it will pass to one of his ten grandchildren. Even in death, Berlusconi is a man surrounded by operatic high intrigue.

Silvio Berlusconi was not often a good man, but he was a great one. History should remember him as such, with a fond admiration and a faint amusement.

Riposa in pace, Il Cavalieri.