Do we like them?

Do we like Silvio Berlusconi?

Our score: 2 out of 10. A long run of demeaning remarks about gay people, women and Barack Obama, a soft line on Putin, and little real good beyond football trophies.

Silvio Berlusconi was born in a Milan suburb in 1936, the son of a bank clerk. He put himself through law school selling vacuum cleaners, photographing social events and running a band on cruise ships. After graduating in 1961 he went into property development, and the cable station he set up for one of his housing estates grew into a national commercial TV empire.

Then came the politics, and the courtrooms. He was Italy's longest-serving prime minister and faced dozens of trials. His only final conviction was for tax fraud at Mediaset, which the Supreme Court upheld in August 2013: a four-year sentence cut to one year, and a Milan court-imposed two-year ban from public office. He insisted he was innocent and accused magistrates of persecuting him.

The bunga bunga saga is the other big one. A court convicted him in 2013 of paying for sex with an under-age dancer and abusing his office, then an appeal court overturned it in 2014, finding he hadn't abused his power and didn't know her age. Italy's top court confirmed the acquittal in March 2015. He always denied paying for sex with her, so that one stays a not guilty, whatever you think of the parties.

On the harm test, his own words are the problem. In 2010, amid the Ruby scandal, he said it was “better to be passionate about beautiful women than to be gay”, and the gay rights group Arcigay called it a chauvinist culture. In 2011 he reportedly told Catholics gay couples would never be allowed to marry or adopt. He called Barack Obama “handsome, young and also suntanned”, which critics called a racist jibe, and told a German MEP he should play a kapo in a film.

To his credit, in 2014 he said fighting for gay civil rights should be “everyone's responsibility”, the day after Pride marches, a rare turn for him. But it came after years of the other stuff, and nothing in what we read shows his government changing course. Under his coalition Italy also passed the 2002 Bossi-Fini migration law with the Northern League.

Putin was the other worry. In February 2023 he said the Ukraine war “would have never happened” if Zelenskyy had stopped attacking Donbass, and a Zelenskyy adviser said it was an attempt to kiss Putin's hands, which were “up to the elbows in blood”. Meloni's office said Italy's support for Ukraine was solid. Pagella Politica, Italy's fact-checker, rated 179 of his statements: 37.5 per cent little or not at all reliable and 22.3 per cent imprecise.