The bunga-bunga man certainly won’t make us feel more European

But to suggest that this explains Berlusconi’s political success presents Italians as morons, programmed to vote for him at the flick of a switch.

The truth is that the main Italian newspapers remain hostile to him. The idea that he has somehow hypnotised the whole of Italy is simply daft

DO you regard yourself as European? Or is Europeanness a fiction that attempts to transform geography into a state of mind? For most of us whose roots are entirely on this continent, the fact that we are European is so self-evidently the case that we never probe the concept too far.