....Money, as Silvio Berlusconi has discovered, can buy you an awful lot of things. It can buy you beautiful palaces and beautiful girls. It can buy you hair and teeth. It can buy you influence – lots and lots of influence. What it can't buy you is unstinting loyalty from your children. The man who recently made the shock announcement that he is "no saint", and who owns, and therefore controls, most of the Italian media – the man, in fact, who knows a thing or two about vanity – has just been castigated by his own daughter, in Vanity Fair.
"Political representatives, who are expected to govern well, [and] make the community prosper, are also expected to safeguard the values that it expresses, possibly to raise them," says Barbara Berlusconi. "I do not believe therefore that a politician can permit himself a distinction between public and private life." In a country which excuses the rich and famous pretty much everything, and in which family ties override most moral and legal concerns, and in which principles like equality of opportunity and a free press are as exotically alien as the American man with a tan darker than Berlusconi's, this is feisty stuff. Bravissima, Barbara! Now, all you have to do is say you don't want the dosh.
Christina Patterson
Thursday, 6 August 2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/christina-patterson/christina-patterson-the-price-of-this-war-keeps-going-up-1767747.html
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