Berlusconi is a flawed figure, but for an idea of the grotesque fury that he arouses in the EU’s intellectual establishment this article by Martin Jacques is a good place to start. Smear follows smear, and not only of Berlusconi (notice how Pim Fortuyn is lumped in with the “racist far right”). “Western democracy,” we are told, “is now under greater threat than at any time since the fall of Nazism” (as a former editor of Marxism Today, Jacques has, perhaps not so strangely, overlooked the Soviet challenge), and it is clear that so far as Jacques is concerned a “rampant, market-driven, consumer society” does not really count as a democracy, especially in Italy. The “Berlusconi regime… is a halfway state between democracy and a new form of totalitarianism that we have not witnessed before.”

This is nonsense – but it’s nonsense that serves a purpose. Ironically, Jacques explains what underpins articles such as this (he, of course, is talking about Berlusconi). “Berlusconi has been pursuing a policy of creeping totalitarianism. His own style of political attack graphically illustrates the point…he is constantly seeking to denigrate, undermine and condemn opponents in the most extreme of terms.”

And this, of course, is exactly what Jacques – and the EU establishment – are doing about Berlusconi.