Paul Thomas: Too much sex, too much power

I've finally figured out who Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi reminds me of - Playboy's Hugh Hefner.

Both are old men with an obsessive interest in young - in 74-year-old Berlusconi's case, perilously young - women. Two years ago, Berlusconi's wife left him over his relationship with an 18-year-old. He now faces charges of having sex with an underage prostitute.

Hefner, 84, recently broke up with 20-year-old identical twins (who were themselves virtually indistinguishable from the protuberant blondes who have alighted on his circular bed over the past 50 years).

He's now engaged to a 24-year-old. It's safe to assume she doesn't look her age.

Both seem to regard sex as a group activity. An escort who wrote a book about her encounters with Berlusconi said his idea of the ideal ratio for an orgy was 20 women to one man, when the man in question was himself.

Apparently orgy etiquette requires matching numbers, "otherwise people get upset".

The "bunga bunga" parties in underground salons at Berlusconi's villas outside Milan and on Sardinia sound very much like the revels at the Playboy mansion, where Playmates frolicked in the grotto, an underground swimming pool with caves and a waterfall.

It's not entirely clear exactly what a "bunga bunga" party is. Even though the term appears in virtually every article about Berlusconi, it's never fleshed out, as it were.

It's not in Cassell's exhaustive Dictionary of Slang and various websites devoted to the etymology of slang offer unhelpful definitions along the lines of "a sex party presided over by Silvio Berlusconi".

The legal submissions aren't much help, either. According to the prosecutors, the parties featured strip-tease, pole dancing and paid sex.

According to Berlusconi's lawyers, the soirees were tame if not deadly dull affairs at which modestly dressed women sipped coke, ate fruit and watched soccer on TV.

The big difference, of course, is that Hefner isn't president. The times may be a-changing but seeing that Bill Clinton was impeached for a few bouts of what he insisted was Clayton's sex, it will be some time before the United States is ready for a president who advocates promiscuity.

While Berlusconi hasn't suspended elections or donned a uniform, the political figure he resembles in more ways than one is a predecessor in Benito Mussolini.

Mussolini's biographer, Nicholas Farrell, estimates Il Duce slept with 5000 women. When his long-time mistress, 28 years his junior, upbraided him over his infidelities, Mussolini informed her that he'd been known to have 14 women on the go simultaneously. No doubt she wished she'd never raised the subject.

Coincidentally, 14 is the number of kept women Berlusconi allegedly installed in a gated complex outside Milan.

It's easy to view Italian politics as a bedroom farce with Berlusconi as bounder-in-chief. The fact that he's received the backing of Italy's most celebrated porn star and support for his party has risen 2 per cent in the last month only adds to the temptation.

But there's a dark sub-plot to this farce. Berlusconi's political power, wealth (he's worth more than $12.5 billion) and influence (he's the biggest player in the Italian media industry) make him more powerful than any individual should be in a democracy.

Imagine if Rupert Murdoch was British prime minister or US president. Given how ruthlessly Murdoch has used his media outlets to advance his political and commercial agendas, one shudders to think how his attack dogs, the Sun and Fox News, would behave if their master was also head of government.

This week, it emerged that one of Italy's most celebrated film directors has been forced to mothball a movie satirising the Berlusconi era because he can't secure financial backing.

A scriptwriter explained to the Guardian that there are basically three sources of funding for Italian movies, all controlled by Berlusconi: his production house, the state broadcaster and the Government.

And bearing in mind that an independent legal system is one of the cornerstones of democracy, it's alarming that Berlusconi could describe Italy's judiciary as a "cancerous growth" and judges as "anthropologically different" from the rest of the human race.

If nations get the leaders they deserve, what have the Italians done to deserve Berlusconi? Two years ago, when he was riding out a similar scandal, Italy-based British writer Tim Parks wrote that Italians were "in the grip of a deep fatalism" which caused them to view Berlusconi's ascendancy as inevitable.

According to columnist Beppe Severgnini, Italians have an affinity for Berlusconi because "he is a walking absolution for our sins - and we have been living in the valley of complicity for a long time".