A saying made famous by the 1966 Broadway musical Caberet, but irrespective of its origin, the phrase came to mind the other day when I was reading a news article about the political demise of Silvio Berlusconi, late Prime Minister of Italy.
He’s quite the character, old Silvio. Elected to the highest office in the nation on 3 separate occasions for a total of about 8 years, he also owns AC Milan football club and is Italy’s answer to Rupert Murdoch, owning the largest media organisation in the country.
Controversy has followed him closely for very many years. Allegations of criminal activity associated with the mafia have never been proved, but hang around him like a bad smell; allegations of conflicts of interest associated with his media ownership and its freedom (or lack thereof) to report politics were so self-evident that he even promised to sell his interests if elected as Prime Minister – but didn’t; and then there’s all the sexual scandal, some of which involved underage girls and some involved prostitution and some involved allegations of blackmail or other forms of corruption.
His wife finally left him after he attended the 18th birthday party of a girl he is alleged to have had sexual relations with. She complained that he had not attended his own son’s 18th and stated that she could not stay with a man who, “consorts with minors”.
But none of this brought him down, in the end. What brought him down was money. Apparently almost any kind of sin, except financial mismanagement, could be forgiven and he could ride out the political storm. Well, actually, even financial (mis?)management could be forgiven – the electorate and the wider European community were prepared to look the other way while Silvio netted enough to make it into the top 120 on the Forbes rich list with a personal fortune of approximately US$6.2billion; but finally, the thing that got him in the end, was that the nations finances were stuffed.
Was this merely the straw that broke the camel’s back? Or would it have been enough, on its own, even without all the preceding doubts about Berlusconi’s character and behaviour, to topple his political supremacy?
To be honest, I don’t know. That’s probably a question that we simply can’t answer, because it would easier to catch the wind in your hand that to try to imagine the electorate’s and the European community’s reactions to the financial collapse of Italy without all the history that had gone before; but at a guess, I would suggest that the national financial mismanagement on its own would have been enough.
Berlusconi could have been the nicest man you would meet, everybody’s favourite Papa, without a hint of scandal or controversy behind him, the perfect clean-skin politician (I know such a thing doesn’t exist, but roll with me on this one!) and he would still have been forced out on his economics alone.
He could have been the greatest politician in Italy, willing and able to cobble together a coalition government with a whole range of new policies to fix the financial problems, but I suspect he still wouldn’t have saved his political skin. The taint of financial mismanagement (of the country – nobody cares about his personal affairs) ran so deep that I doubt the power-that-be around Europe would have been satisfied with anything short of his demise.
The proverbial blind eye is turned, by both electorate and his European partners, to every kind of sin imaginable, except the sin of financial mismanagement. Money sure does make the world go round!
