Michelle Obama embraces clever tactic to deal with Silvio

ARMA virumque cano.

That surprised you, didn’t it? You weren’t expecting to get a lash of Latin over your Weetabix this Monday morning. This first line from Virgil’s Aeneid – “I sing of arms and the man” – gave Shaw the title for a play.

But it took on new life, this weekend, when Silvio Berlusconi got his comeuppance at the hands of America’s first lady.

Sorry, that should be “at the hand”. Singular. Because that was all old Sleazy Silvio got from Michelle. One hand. He was at the G8 unencumbered by a wife, because the long-suffering woman who until recently held that unenviable post seems to have eventually said “enough already with the call girls and the lewd lingerie” and set about divorcing him at last.

Silvio is sometimes described as a ladies’ man. (This is a contradictory term for men who hang around with women who by no stretch of the linguistic imagination can be called ladies.)

Silvio is sometimes described – by his staff – as a sex addict. (This is a way of medicalising what used to be called dirty-old-manhood.)

Silvio is sometimes described as a withered old randy goat. (This last description has the virtue of understated kindness.)

Of course, all of us who have worked with politicians know one or more with whom it is not safe to share a lift, a car or even a carpark (if you’re of the opposite sex) and around whom it is unwise to wear a skirt.

Indeed, some of us have worked with politicians whose reputations would suggest rubber bands around the ends of one’s trousers to exclude marauding paws.

And, because we are generous of spirit, we do not regard even the dodgiest hiring of sex workers as defining a man as a bad politician.

Which, presumably, is why the Pope met dear old Silvio recently, despite him bringing gaffe-prone gracelessless to new heights with offerings like his description of Barack Obama as “young, handsome and tanned”.

Because he was at the G8 and because Obama’s wife had accompanied the President, Sexpot Silvio presented to Barack Obama had also to be introduced to the President’s wife. Obama did his duty.

The great thing is that he did it in front of the cameras, which tell the story of an encounter that lasted perhaps 20 seconds, but, in that short time, is an object-lesson in confident refusal to be manipulated by what we’ll euphemistically call Mediterranean charm. Marvellous, the pictures are.

There she is, Michelle, in a shimmering sundress with spaghetti straps and a long string of fat faux pearls. She meets several of Europe’s power figures and embraces them so warmly that Gordon Brown’s hand rests on her satiny shoulder while he kisses her.

Ditto Angela Merkel. Dmitry Medvedev hasn’t the nerve to put his hands on her, but stands like a schoolboy, eyes closed in ecstasy, while Michelle squeezes his upper arms and delivers a smacker on his left cheek.

Then along comes Silvio. Now, I would not suggest for a moment that Michelle’s nearly six foot height makes him look like a garden gnome, but let’s just hold the garden gnome image until something better suggests itself.

This beautifully suited garden gnome is introduced by Obama to Obama’s wife.

Obama, untypically grim as to the visage, stands between them. He gets rapidly grimmer as to the visage when Silvio does a “Let me embrace you, you know you want me to” gesture of invitation and admiration in Michelle’s direction.

Michelle stands her ground. Not only does she not sink into the promiscuous embrace of Silvio, she does the opposite. Across the gap between them, she extends a hand. Just one. The right one.

At the end of a straight arm. A very straight, very long arm. If Michelle Obama ever wants to take up music, there’s a double bass somewhere, aching to get to know her, she’s that long in the arms.

Those arms have taken her onto the front cover of Vogue, this year. Because she’s got a great smile, beautiful eyes, relates fearlessly to a camera and has a ruthlessly individual style to her, the new First Lady was always going to be featured on the front of popular publications.

WHEN photographed for the magazine fashion bible, she could have played it safe and worn full length or cropped sleeves. Instead, as so often before, she went sleeveless, her highly toned upper arms the envy of women worldwide who, at her age, found themselves with fatty flaps between shoulder and elbow if they raised their straightened arms to the sides of their body. Michelle Obama is a highly qualified lawyer, a confident wife and mother, and an able public performer.

She works out, eats healthy food and has the sort of wonderfully shapely upper arms Silvio would make an art form of caressing. If he’d got near enough to caress them.

The problem, from his point of view, was that the hand he was invited to shake came at the end of one of them, and the firm distance established by the length of the unbending arm meant that unless he threw Michelle’s hand to one side and went at her like a gorilla, he was always going to be three feet away from the satiny shoulders to which Gordon Brown paid hand homage.

Game, set and match to Michelle. Let’s hear it for a First Lady who knows who to hug and who not to hug. She broke the Buckingham Palace rules, a few months back, by putting one of those glowing arms around the Queen, and protocol-pedants were dismayed to see the Queen putting her arm around Michelle in response.

She’s tactile, touching, hugging and hanging on to her own daughters with the same ease with which she reaches for her husband’s hand as they walk together.

But she had clearly decided, long before her husband introduced her to the Italian Prime Minister in the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh, that she was not going to waste a hug on Silvio – or be flattered by him into submitting to even a brief total embrace, never mind one of those long-range jobs involving kisses on both cheeks.

Having made her decision, she managed to remove his dignity in front of the world press without for a moment cutting back on the wattage of her apparently delighted smile.

Her husband looked good and mad at whatever oul Italian seductive guff Silvio offered at the point of introduction. Michelle’s smile never faltered. Nor did the physical resolution of the arm she raised, long as a bargepole, decisive as a toll barrier, between him and her.

This was not a military victory, but it was one hell of a victory, nonetheless. So, at the beginning of the week, all of the sisterhood who’ve ever submitted to an unwanted embrace, who’ve ever been dragged unwillingly into a two-sided kiss, who’ve ever shuddered as a male hand lingered too long on a shoulder or a hip should sing of arms and the man.

The arms of Michelle Obama putting the man – sweet old Silvio – in his place.