Nobility is not a quality many associate with Berlusconi. Ego, yes. Insecurity, bags of it. "Berlusconi lacks self-confidence," says Antonio Martino, his former foreign and defense minister, who holds the second-ever membership card issued by Berlusconi's Forza Italia political movement. Martino is a ribald Sicilian, an ever-smoking free-market economist, whose ideas once appealed to Berlusconi.

When they met in 1993, the first thing Berlusconi asked him was whether or not he liked soccer. Martino demurred. "For me, everything else is business," he recalls Berlusconi telling him. "But A.C. Milan is religion. Even if the most beautiful woman in the world asked to see me during a game, I would tell her to wait."

When Martino asked Berlusconi why he was going into politics, Berlusconi replied, "When I was in real estate, I said I would build a satellite city outside Milan and they laughed in my face. When I bought my football team and said I would win the championship, they laughed at me. When I created Mediaset, Gianni Agnelli [the late owner of Fiat], laughed in my face." By Martino's reasoning, Berlusconi went into politics to stick it to those who believed he couldn't.

"The problem is that I've never met any other successful person who talks so much about his successes."

As a businessman, Berlusconi has always inspired great loyalty. "My companies have never had an hour's strike against them," he says. "I used to spend Saturday mornings going to see and visit my staff and employees who for example were in hospital. I knew them all by name and I got to a point where I had 56,000 people working for me. In politics, it has been more or less the same. I was able to raise the sympathy, even the love of a lot of people. You should see when I go to rallies the people just physically wanted to get me, they'd follow me all the time. They say that in the history of Italy, there was not a politician able to move crowds as much as I was able to."

He talks, he claims, off the cuff without written speeches, and that his openness and personal contentment shine through. When he spoke to the salesforce at his television stations and advertising businesses, he would tell them it was vital to "carry the sun in your pocket," because optimism was attractive. "I am happy with myself," he says. "I am held in esteem by the people who love me. One third of the Italian people deeply love me and prove it to me all the time. When I walk down the streets, they clog them up, if I go to a restaurant, people stand up and clap and I can't pay a bill."

When he has failed, he believes, is when he has paid attention to his miserable critics, and let the sun in his pocket fade. The one lesson he took from Margaret Thatcher, he says, he took too late.

She once asked him to describe his working day. Up at 7:30, he told her, work all day. Then at 1:30 am read the next day's papers, get angry, and then sleep for five hours. "Really?" she said. "You read the newspapers?" "What do you do then, Mrs. Thatcher," Berlusconi asked her. She answered, "I read only the articles that speak well of me and my government, which my head of press brings to me in the morning."