Nicholas Farrell is the author of Mussolini: A New Life (Weidenfield & Nicolson/Orion Phoenix)
We are in a hotel suite at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Zurich when Stephen K. Bannon tells me he adores the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. But let’s be clear. Bannon — as far as I can tell — is not a fascist. He is, however, fascinated by fascism, which is understandable, as its founder Benito
It’s nice to get an election prediction right. Well, more or less right anyway. The Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) – the drain-the-swamp-screw-everything protest movement founded by a comedian and run like a Scientology sect – has got many more votes in Sunday’s Italian general elections than opinion polls had suggested. According to exit polls conducted by
I’ve been hearing disturbing but well-informed voices about the result of the election in Italy, the Eurozone’s third biggest economy, which if correct will cause the global liberal elite to go ape and try to section Italy. The result which such voices are predicting will have a similarly disturbing effect on global libertarian conservatives. As
Ravenna Amid relentless propaganda about Italy being in the grip of fascism, Italians go to the polls on Sunday. It will be an attempt to produce their first elected prime minister since 2008, when Silvio Berlusconi won. Since his resignation in 2011, Italy has had four unelected leaders. Italy’s migrant crisis has dominated these elections,
The man who could become Italy’s next prime minister is sat just opposite the entrance to the huge US and Nato airbase near Catania in Sicily at a hotel confiscated from the Mafia. It’s not Silvio Berlusconi, no matter how much the British press tells us that ‘Berlusconi is Back!’ Silvio Il Magnifico (as I
Following the EU’s deal with Turkey over people smuggling, the issue of migrants trying to cross, and quite often drowning in, the Mediterranean has largely disappeared from the British media. There have been no more images like that of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish beach after the rubber dinghy in which his
What is happening in the 300-mile stretch of sea between Sicily and Libya, day in and day out — in other words, what ‘we’ are doing there — is beyond reasonable doubt insane. A sane person would assume that the 181,436 migrants (a new record) who made it by sea to Italy last year had
That the Tunisian terrorist who slaughtered 12 people in Berlin on Monday was even in Europe, let alone able to move about Europe with ease, is a scandal. It shows that the policy of the European Union and its member nations on the migrant crisis is a complete and dangerous failure. The collective refusal of
Theresa May was not the only elephant in the room at Thursday’s European Union summit in Brussels, and EU leaders studiously ignored the other one as well. Paolo Gentiloni, Italy’s new Prime Minister – its fourth unelected one in a row since 2011 – must somehow save Monte Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank,
Matteo Renzi lost his constitutional reform referendum – and his job – for a simple reason: too many Italians from across the political spectrum opposed the Florentine and what he represented. What he stood for is easy to see from the names of those who gave him their wholehearted support: Jean-Claude Juncker, Angela Merkel, Mario Draghi,
Those in charge of civilisation have been quick to compare Donald Trump to Silvio ‘bunga bunga’ Berlusconi as part of their crusade to deliver us from evil. The similarities between the Yankie and the Latino – despite the racial chasm that divides them – are just too good to be true. Both are dodgy tycoons,
Though he is a big fan of the European Union, Barack Obama brings bad karma to it. So perhaps he should not have chosen Greece and Germany, the two countries which illustrate so poignantly why the euro is doomed, for his last foreign tour. His farewell visit is, if not a kiss of death, surely
Many thousands of words have been written and many more will now be written by the liberal intelligentsia on trying to prove that the 45th President of the United States of America is a fascist. Among the first to leap out of the starting blocks after the triumph of Trump was the hyper-trendy historian Simon Schama
The massive operation by 1,200 French riot police and gendarmes to bus the migrants in the ‘Jungle’ at Calais to reception centres elsewhere in France and to raze the illegal camp to the ground has begun. Allelujah. You might think that the destruction of this crime-ridden and rat-infested shantytown, where up to 10,000 mainly African
You just have to look at the faces of the migrant ‘children’ who have begun to arrive in Britain over the past couple of days from the Jungle in Calais to realise that many are not children. Just as I did when I visited the illegal shanty-town a couple of weeks ago and met a man
Calais On Sunday evening a British motorist, Abraham Reichman, 35, from Stamford Hill, north London, hit two Eritrean migrants who were trying to block the A16 outside Calais. They had leapt in front of his car, he says, as he slowed down to avoid dozens of migrants on the motorway. Terrified, Mr Reichman drove off
Lido di Dante, Ravenna When the earthquake struck in the dead of night at 3.36 a.m. — the Devil’s Hour — I was in front of my computer in what used to be the cow shed. This is the only time of day when my six boisterous children and their high-voltage Italian mother are not
If your destiny is to be shot dead with your mistress, where better than Lake Como, which, in the words of Shelley, ‘exceeds anything I ever beheld in beauty, with the exception of the Arbutus Islands in Killarney’? It was in Giulino di Mezzegra, a tiny village in the mountains above the lake, that a
Ravenna At a car park a short walk from Dante’s tomb, one of the gang of illegal immigrants who tell motorists where to park and hound them for cash agreed to talk to me for €20. His name was Billy, he said, and he was 22. He was from Senegal and a Muslim. He had
In Italy, media coverage of the triumph of Brexit has been wall-to-wall as Italians worry about the collateral damage and wonder if they too dare… So far La bomba Britannica has hit the Milan stock market much harder than the London one. On Friday, Milan fell by 12 per cent against the FTSE-100’s 3.5 per
