So the president lied, although he would do almost anything to avoid admitting that he had done so. From the moment allegations about an affair with Lewinsky broke in January 1998 and he informed his top advisers that ‘There’s nothing going on between us,’ he was parsing his own sentences like the world’s most pedantic English teacher. ‘It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is,’ he insisted to Starr’s grand jury when he was finally dragged in front of them seven months later. ‘If “is” means “is and never has been,” that is one thing. If it means “there is none,” that was a completely true statement…. If someone had asked me on that day, “Are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky?”, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said “no.” And it would have been completely true.’64
Clinton even tried to quibble over exactly what did and didn’t count as sex, a topic most of us haven’t had to argue about since teenage sleepovers. As the official record summarized it:
the President acknowledged ‘inappropriate intimate contact’ with Ms. Lewinsky but maintained that his January deposition testimony was accurate….
As to his denial in the Jones deposition that he and Ms. Lewinsky had had a ‘sexual relationship,’ the President maintained that there can be no sexual relationship without sexual intercourse, regardless of what other sexual activities may transpire. He stated that ‘most ordinary Americans’ would embrace this distinction.
… In the President’s view, ‘any person, reasonable person’ would recognize that oral sex performed on the deponent falls outside the definition.65
And, because as the president put it, ‘I had a very careful thing I said, and I tried not to say anything else,’ that meant he wasn’t technically lying.66
He had backed himself into a dead end with no room to manoeuvre, and dragged along all of his closest aides and supporters, including his wife, Hillary, who was literally standing by his side when he made his fateful January statement to the public. The next night, she had gone on TV by herself to deny ‘unequivocally’ everything her husband had been accused of and tell people to ‘be patient and take a deep breath… the truth will come out.’67
And the truth always does find its way out, even from dead ends. On the evening of 17 August, President Clinton made another broadcast, this time on his own. Lewinsky had admitted everything – that she had had an affair with the president and that she had lied about it – after striking a deal with Starr that she would not be prosecuted over her false affidavit in the Jones case. Having been issued with a subpoena requiring him to answer Starr’s questions about Lewinsky under oath, Clinton had appeared in front of his nemesis. No sitting president had been legally compelled to do such a thing in US history. (Nixon had resigned rather than meet such a fate.)
‘While my answers were legally accurate I did not volunteer information,’ he told the American people. ‘I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact it was wrong.’ He had the grace to add: ‘I misled people, including even my wife. I deeply regret that.’ But he couldn’t resist defending himself: ‘It is nobody’s business but ours – even presidents have private lives.’68
Starr begged to differ. His 445-page report, published the next month, gave full lip-smacking details of ten separate sexual encounters between Clinton and Lewinsky, including the number of times he ejaculated, how often she orgasmed, what exactly the stains on her dress consisted of and, possibly most humiliatingly for him, the position he preferred so as not to aggravate his bad back.
But there was one thing that all the legalese and sanctimony of the Starr report couldn’t disguise: sneaking snogs with your boss under the pretence of delivering important paperwork, exchanging gifts he could display in public as a secret signal and having rudies in the Oval Office when someone might walk in at any moment – it all sounds quite fun. Compared with other activities that have been conducted there over the years, it’s also pretty harmless.
‘I merely made a telephone call to find someone who could make themselves available for the entrusting of a person who had aroused the sympathy of us all.’
Silvio Berlusconi, account of his contact with Milan police after arrest of teenager, 29 October 2010
It was a fairly routine night’s work for the Milan police: a seventeen-year-old girl had been arrested after an accusation of theft. Her name was Karima El Mahroug. She had run away from home in her early teens and had since spent time in a succession of children’s homes. Now she told police she was living independently, earning money working as a belly dancer in nightclubs. Yet she could not provide either identity papers or a permanent address, and the police computer turned up details of an earlier arrest on suspicion of theft. Because of her age, the child protection authorities were contacted.
Annamaria Fiorillo, an official with the juvenile court, ordered that El Mahroug be kept in custody until a place at a children’s home could be found for her. It was already nearly eight o’clock at night, so that was unlikely to happen before morning. El Mahroug threw a strop about having to spend a night in jail, but that wasn’t unusual. Police were, however, worried that she would be too cold in the skimpy clothes she had on, so they took her to the flat she said she had been staying in so she could collect something warmer. Her flatmate – who they suspected was working as a prostitute – happened to be in. She, too, kicked up a fuss, and started making phone calls. But it was when the police took El Mahroug back to the station and locked her in her cell for the night that things took an unusual turn. Station commander Vincenzo Indolfi got a phone call, and the prime minister was on the other end of the line.69
Silvio Berlusconi insisted there was nothing strange about his interrupting a trip to Paris to intervene personally in the case of an alleged petty thief back home. ‘I am a person with a heart, and so I take an interest in people’s problems,’ he protested when asked about the incident.70 But he went rather further than that. ‘The caller said something like: “Is it true that you have detained this person? Then make the necessary checks and see what to do,” ’ said Indolfi.71 Berlusconi told the commander that El Mahroug was a relative of the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak – accounts differ as to whether he claimed she was his niece or granddaughter – and if he and his colleagues didn’t handle things correctly, they could end up with a serious diplomatic incident on their hands.
She was nothing of the sort. She wasn’t even Egyptian – she came from Morocco, some three thousand kilometres away – but Berlusconi was never very good at all that racial stuff, greeting the election of Barack Obama two years previously by joking about how ‘tanned’ he was. For his part the prime minister claimed to have honestly believed El Mahroug’s claims about Mubarak – he’d even brought her up in conversation with the Egyptian leader during a summit earlier in the month, resulting in what aides described as ‘a rather confused conversation’ – and only realized a few days later that ‘everything she told me was a load of balls.’72 But it didn’t convince Annamaria Fiorillo, the magistrate who had given strict instructions that El Mahroug only be released when a place had been found for her in care. ‘If she’s Mubarak’s granddaughter then I’m Queen Nefertiti of the Nile,’ she snorted – but by then it was too late.73 The seventeen-year-old had been discharged from the police station at around 2 a.m., in the company of twenty-five-year-old Nicole Minetti.
Minetti’s career encapsulates everything you need to know about Berlusconi’s Italy. She started off as a showgirl on one of the TV stations the prime minister owned; all Italian telly, no matter what genre, is liberally sprinkled with girls in bikinis. Then she retrained as a dental hygienist. She caught Berlusconi’s eye when she treated him after he had several teeth smashed by an attacker at a rally in 2009. They started sleeping together – she insists she ‘felt a sentiment of true love’ – and he promptly installed her as a candidate for his own party. By 2011 she had a seat in the regional council in Lombardy. She was also be
ing investigated, along with two of the prime minister’s other associates, on suspicion of aiding and abetting prostitution by providing young women for the ‘bunga-bunga’ parties he notoriously hosted at Villa Certosa in Sardinia, at least some of which El Mahroug had attended (after lying about her age to secure an invitation).74 El Mahroug claimed to have received €7,000 in cash from Berlusconi, an expensive necklace and even a car for her services, which she has always insisted (though a court begged to differ) did not involve sex with the prime minister.75 But her presence alone provided more than enough motive for both Minetti and Berlusconi to want to get Karima El Mahroug out of police custody, quick smart.
El Mahroug did not shy from talking about how the prime minister had generously rewarded her. ‘I felt like Cinderella,’ she simpered in one of the interviews she subsequently gave.76 But she wasn’t Cinderella. Nor was she ‘Ruby the Heartstealer’, the nickname given to her by her male clients (and adopted by the eager media), who invariably prefer to think of a woman’s participation in the sex industry as something voluntary and occasionally romantic rather than exploitative and often gross. El Mahroug had been a child runaway, who by her own account had been raped at the age of nine by two of her uncles and physically abused by her own father. When she went to Villa Certosa in February 2010, she was still seventeen, a minor, and if the seventy-four-year-old Berlusconi had had sex with her – as a number of witnesses at his subsequent trial testified he had – then it was a criminal offence under Italian law.
If Berlusconi had abused his office by intervening to spring her from the cells, then that was another criminal offence. And both could be added to the welter of charges the prime minister was facing – for corruption, bribery and tax offences. ‘I am without a doubt the person who has been the most persecuted in the entire history of the world and the history of man,’ he wailed histrionically in October 2009, after being stripped of his immunity from prosecution as an elected official.77 This get-out-of-jail-free card had been one of his main reasons for going into politics in the first place. He’d been trailed by claims of massive corruption in his business career, and most of his efforts since getting into government had been devoted to trying to maintain and even extend the immunity perk. (He preferred to call it ‘reforming the justice system’.) When it looked like he would face trial over the bunga-bunga parties and wiretaps of Minetti’s phones were forming a major part of the prosecution case, he even tried to push a law outlawing the use of interception evidence through the Italian parliament. It failed.
What was needed, rather than desperate back-covering, was some statesmanlike behaviour – and that was exactly what Berlusconi didn’t provide. ‘It’s better to be passionate about beautiful girls than to be gay,’ he grinned when the news about El Mahroug broke, a comment that his own minister for equal opportunities – another former showgirl – felt compelled to denounce.78 Even El Mahroug managed a more mature take than the prime minister, despite being nearly six decades years his junior: ‘He is an institution, he should behave that way…. He can’t expect discretion from people he doesn’t know.’79
Berlusconi’s status as the dirty old man of Europe had been well established the previous year, when his wife announced she wanted a divorce after he presented a glamour model with a diamond necklace at her eighteenth birthday party (he had missed his own daughters’ coming-of-age celebrations). ‘I cannot remain with a man who consorts with minors,’ Veronica Lario announced in an open letter to the press.80 Although polls showed the PM’s priapism played well with some male Italian voters, the latest revelations prompted women’s groups to lead a million-strong march demanding his resignation.
More revelations were coming. One prostitute claimed the bungabunga parties had been kept supplied with marijuana flown in on the PM’s official plane. Police raided a gated apartment complex where he was rumoured to keep a harem of young women on call, and found large amounts of cash and expensive jewellery. El Mahroug’s mobile phone records showed that she had been present at Berlusconi’s villa at the same time as Russian leader Vladimir Putin, although no one could prove the two had met.
The case involving El Mahroug came to court in the summer of 2013, by which time Berlusconi had long since left the prime minister’s office – though not as a result of any the multiple criminal charges he was facing; he had simply lost his parliamentary majority in the midst of fractious negotiations over an austerity package imposed by the EU after the financial crisis. He had previously been found guilty of tax fraud over a business deal in the nineties, but his prison sentence was commuted to community service. Two other cases for tax evasion and bribery had expired under the statute of limitations before they could make their way through Italy’s labyrinthine legal system. Now the court ruled that Berlusconi had had sex with El Mahroug on no fewer than thirteen separate occasions, and abused his office with the phone call to the police station: he was sentenced to seven years in jail. A year later the appeal court overturned both convictions and acquitted him: though it didn’t deny he had slept with the teenager, it ruled that there was no proof he knew she was underage at the time.
At time of writing, three years later, related cases were still ongoing. Italian prosecutors were seeking charges against dozens of young female witnesses in the trial for perjury, and although Berlusconi had admitted to paying them large amounts of cash, he insisted he did so out of his natural generosity rather than to persuade them to lie in court. El Mahroug – who at the height of the scandal announced she was marrying a nightclub owner in his forties – was one of the women on the list. She continued to maintain that she never had sex with the prime minister. ‘It is the first time in my life that a man has not tried to take me to bed,’ she told La Repubblica. ‘He behaved like a father, I swear.’81
3
FINANCIAL FIBBING
There is a peculiar statistical anomaly that, just as we all impossibly believe ourselves to be better-than-average drivers, most of us assume our own income is somewhere close to average, if not on the low side. It allows us to go on simultaneously resenting both ‘the rich’ and the taxman, who must surely be helping himself to a bit more of our pay packet than everyone else’s.
There has certainly always been a tendency among politicians to consider themselves badly paid. Oddly, it seems particularly prevalent in the sort of MPs who think other public servants, like social workers and nurses, ought to practise restraint in their salary demands and consider the virtue of their work as its own reward. But even those who like to make much of their own humility can seem to lack an awareness of how they compare to their constituents. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who in 2016 was earning £137,000 a year, has the sort of pension after thirty-four years’ service in Westminster that I am journalistically obliged to describe as ‘gold-plated’. He also owned a home in one of London’s most expensive boroughs. Yet he blithely announced: ‘I don’t consider myself highbrow or wealthy’.1
He and every single one of his parliamentary colleagues, are. An MP’s basic salary in 2016 was £74,962, nearly three times the national average.2 The perks of the job aren’t bad, either. But the company they keep doesn’t help to keep them grounded. Civil service rates ensure that MPs’ most senior advisers are considerably better paid than they are, and there is a surfeit of millionaires and billionaires keen to lobby them at every turn. New Labour made partying with celebrities into a political virtue, with Blair and his freebie-fan wife spending so much time in the holiday homes of fading pop stars.
When the coalition was assembled, twenty-three out of the twenty-nine incoming ministers were estimated to be millionaires, largely thanks to inherited wealth or property investments. After Theresa May assumed the mantle of leadership, having declared that her administration would be dedicated to everyone who was ‘Just About Managing’, she promptly selected as one of their representatives at the top table Boris Johnson, the man who described the £250,000 he got for moonlighting for the Daily Telegraph as ‘chicken
feed’.3
The precarious nature of a political career probably doesn’t help either. When your statutory notice period is exactly as long as it takes the returning officer to finish a sentence, a nest egg is going to seem rather desirable. But what is perhaps unique to politicians is that they get to make their own rules. As this chapter will demonstrate, that means they can build in sufficient loopholes, ambiguities and get-out clauses to allow them to claim to be operating within both the letter and the spirit of the law – right up until the moment they get caught doing something that really doesn’t add up.
* * * * *
‘I think I can reasonably claim a respite from the burdens of responsibility and the glare of publicity which inevitably surrounds a Minister and, inexcusably, engulfs the private life even of his family.’
Home Secretary Reginald Maudling, resignation letter, 18 July 1972
At least Reginald Maudling was honest about his motivations. He had spent fourteen years in Parliament, all but two of them in ministerial office, and had failed to succeed Harold Macmillan as Conservative leader. The party’s defeat in 1964 was the perfect opportunity for him to concentrate on ‘building up a little pot of money for my old age’, as he put it.4 He would have been the first to admit that he hadn’t shown much skill in that area as chancellor of the exchequer – he left a note for his successor at the Treasury, Jim Callaghan, which read ‘Good luck, old cock – Sorry to leave it in such a mess.’5 But both he and his wife, Beryl, had expensive tastes, and now it was time to start making some cash in order to fund them.
The Lies of the Land Page 6