Tony Blair sought to avoid unwelcome headlines suggesting he was “snuggling up” to Silvio Berlusconi by not inviting media lobby correspondents to a UK-Italy summit in Rome, newly released documents reveal.
Before the February 2002 bilateral, Britain’s ambassador to Rome, John Shepherd, told the government it had a “real opportunity” to exploit the Italian prime minister’s “orientations in Europe in support of UK interests, holding our noses and staying alert to the risks as we do”.
Berlusconi, who died last month, was seen as providing an opportunity to balance the influential Franco-German axis in the EU, but had captured headlines over comments on the “superiority” of western civilisation, new allegations of corruption, his sacking of his foreign minister Renato Ruggiero, and his blocking of the European arrest warrant agreement, according to documents released by the National Archives.
The fact that the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, had refused to sign a joint letter with Berlusconi, and the French president, Jacques Chirac, had supped with Berlusconi “with a longish spoon”, had “implications for us”, Stephen Wall, an EU adviser to Blair, wrote before the summit.
Referencing Spain’s then prime minister, José María Aznar, Wall told Blair: “It has been to our advantage to work closely with Aznar and to be seen doing so. It will be to our advantage to work with Berlusconi, but not to be seen doing so.”
In an annotation, Blair wrote: “Actually joking apart, I agree with your last para! But he is essential in the alliance against federation.”
Roger Liddle, Blair’s special adviser on European matters, warned him they needed to “protect you against possible charges of cuddling up to the unacceptable right which may come from the French and Germans”.
A memo to Peter Hain, then the minister for Europe, who was accompanying Blair to Rome, from David Whineray, of the Foreign Office, said the summit would be a “difficult” one. “We want to avoid ‘Blair snuggles up to Berlusconi’ headlines,” he said, suggesting attention needed to be shifted away from “the Berlusconi show”.
The strategy was to “downplay the summit in advance. No 10 are not taking the lobby,” Whineray wrote. Making Hain available would show it was a “UK-Italy (not Blair-Berlusconi) summit”.
“To get our message out early on the day (without being bombarded by Berlusconi questions) we will need to target media outlets carefully,” he wrote. It was recommended that Hain do Sky News and BBC Radio 5 Live Breakfast “where the questioning is likely to be ‘soft’”, but avoid the Today programme “as they are likely to be only interested in Berlusconi”.
In a scene-setting memo to Kim Darroch in the Foreign Office, Shepherd wrote that courting Berlusconi was a “major opportunity”.
He wrote: “Berlusconi told me in December 2000 that he had spent some 50bn lira on legal expenses. He will spend his last cent (even though he says he has yet to spend any euros!) on ensuring he preserves his Houdini-like ability to avoid conviction.”
Shepherd concluded: “We should reckon on him being in the seat for a good long time yet. Even if he does eventually come a cropper for whatever reason, we have at least in the short term a real opportunity to exploit and form his government’s orientations in Europe in support of UK interests, holding our noses and staying alert to the risks as we do.”
