Paddy Agnew on Silvio Berlusconi – Charming salesman’s route to the top was dogged by scandal

The first time your correspondent came eyeball to eyeball with Silvio Berlusconi was in the spring of 1988. The media tycoon, who died yesterday morning in hospital in Milan at the age of 86, had come to the Foreign Press Club in Rome to promote a business deal that his Programma Italia advertising company had just concluded with Soviet Union authorities, no less.