Silvio Berlusconi's fondness for partying has taken a physical and political toll on the Italian prime minister, according a friend in contact with the US embassy in Rome.
Giampiero Cantoni, the then chairman of the Italian Senate's defence committee, was quoted in a leaked embassy cable from October 2009 as saying the results of medical tests on Berlusconi had come back "a complete mess". He told an embassy official "we are all worried about his health".
Berlusconi had fainted in public three times in recent years, and his "frequent late nights and penchant for partying hard mean he does not get sufficient rest", Cantoni said.
The cable disclosed that when the current US ambassador in Rome, David Thorne, paid his first call on the prime minister the previous month, "Berlusconi dozed off briefly".
Thorne quoted Berlusconi's right-hand man, the former journalist Gianni Letta, as having said that a string of scandals last year over the leader's private life had left him "physically and politically weak". He said the normally hyperactive billionaire-turned-politician was "not energetic".
Controversy first erupted in spring 2009 when Berlusconi was found to have a friendship, that was never fully explained, with an 18-year-old aspiring model and actress, Noemi Letizia. Cantoni revealed that Berlusconi believed the Italian intelligence services "might have deliberately entrapped him" in the Letizia affair.
Speculation over the prime minister's private life ended abruptly in December when he was swamped by a wave of public sympathy after being hit in the face with a model of Milan cathedral. On 30 December Thorne flew to Berlusconi's estate at Arcore, near Milan, where, according to another cable, he found the prime minister "bandaged and bruised" but eager to show off a new project for training Italy's future leaders.
Berlusconi told him he was lucky the model had only struck him a glancing blow. If it had hit him straight on "it would have killed" him, he claimed.
Apparently out of the prime minister's hearing, Letta told Thorne that "Berlusconi had slumped into a depression following the attack – 'he's an impresario, he wants everyone to love him' – but that he had snapped out of it and was on the mend".
After lunch, Berlusconi led the ambassador on a tour of the Lombardy estate he had bought. "The completely renovated 17th century country mansion, Villa Gernetto, will house a special school set to open in March for one hundred of Italy's most talented young leaders completely funded from Berlusconi's personal fortune," the ambassador reported. "The prime minister intends to choose the students himself and he envisions an environment where Italy's best and brightest live and study, taught by world leaders "like [Tony] Blair and [Bill] Clinton.'"
In fact, by the end of March the proposed new University of Liberal Thought had yet to open its doors. And there was no news of whether the former British and US leaders Blair or Clinton had agreed to join the staff.
But in April, the prime minister did use Villa Gernetto for an Italian-Russian summit. And at the press conference afterwards, he made an important announcement: "I have told [prime minister Vladimir] Putin to send young Russians too and I've invited him to be the first teacher to give a lecture in this university. From the way he welcomed my proposal, I understood that he would be glad to do so."The two Italian politicians identified in the cables as the source of information on Berlusconi's health today denied the views attributed to them.
Letta said: "The truth is exactly the opposite." He added: "Faced with rumours and insinuations about a depressed and listless Berlusconi, I have always denied this both in public and private and stated the pure truth and that is that the prime minister was and is on top form, with the vitality that everyone acknowledges in him. He has always tackled every situation with his habitual determination and customary pluck."
Cantoni told the Ansa news agency: "I have never made, let alone discussed, either with officials or with former American ambassadors, statements such as those on the prime minister's health reported in the secret files and disclosed by WikiLeaks." He added: "It is not my practice to pick up gossip and tittle-tattle which appears in the media and which evidently goes into feeding geopolitical intelligence analyses that are of themselves devoid of strategic content and valid documentation."
