Berlusconi: the Man Who Wasn't There

Other world leaders should take note.

Silvio Berlusconi has achieved a seemingly impossible - and, for a politician, wholly desirable - feat. He has managed to put himself at the very centre of politics by being nowhere near it.

On Wednesday evening, he finally slipped back into his Roman "palazzo" after an absence of a month, interrupted by just two trips to the capital to chair meetings of the cabinet.

The result has been fevered speculation, all of which turns on the person of Italy's recently virtual leader. Where has he been? And what on earth has he been up to?

Theory number one: he has been having cosmetic surgery. That is what his doctor told the newspaper La Stampa last week. Umberto Scapagnini was quoted as saying the image-conscious tycoon-turned-statesman had had "a small plastic surgery operation [on the area] round the eyes".

On Friday, the weekly magazine L'Espresso will carry a more detailed account. According to this, the Italian prime minister's operation was anything but "small". The magazine says that on December 28 he was operated on for no less than five hours at a Swiss clinic by a team of doctors headed by a Californian surgeon, Dr Bryant Toth.

The prime minister's spokespeople decline to comment on this and a call to Dr Toth's practice in San Francisco elicited neither a confirmation nor a denial. "There are regulations in America that prevent me from speaking to you," one of his assistants told the Guardian.

If the length of the operation, which L'Espresso said was a full face-lift, does not suffice to explain the length of Mr Berlusconi's absence from public view, then the magazine has a further explanation. It says the prime minister's convalescence did not go smoothly and that some of the muscles in his face swelled up, reducing the mobility of one of his eyes.

Theory number two is the conspiracy theory: he did not have an operation at all; he needed treatment for something more serious and the story about the plastic surgery is a smokescreen.

Seven years ago, Mr Berlusconi was operated on for cancer. He did not reveal the fact at the time, so it would not be surprising if he hushed up another operation.

The evidence in favour of this theory is, first of all, that no one who has seen him has remarked on any particular change. Indeed, one of his ministers said he could see no difference at all.

Secondly, Dr Scapagnini, the man who was quoted by La Stampa, has since denied saying his patient had had cosmetic surgery. But, talking to the Ansa news agency, he added that the prime minister had "never been so well" and an aide to Mr Berlusconi said: "He is not seriously ill."

Hence, explanation number three: Mr Berlusconi has simply been taking a bit of a rest and, as his aides first indicated, doing some strategic thinking about how to steer his coalition through the second half of his government.

What do I think? Well, I am tempted to believe none of these theories is correct, and that the whole affair was dreamt up by Mr Berlusconi's "spin doctors" because, whatever its cause, his tantalising absence from the limelight has focused more attention on him than most Italian politicians are capable of attracting with a hundred speeches.

At a time when Italy's legislators would no doubt prefer the voters to be weighing the pros and cons of, say, the government's legal reform, the issue that is really capturing their imagination is: what does Silvio Berlusconi look like now? It is a PR masterstroke.

All may - or may not - become clear on Saturday when he is due to appear in public for the first time since before Christmas, at a rally in Rome to mark the 10th anniversary of his decision to enter politics.

Not since Salome teasingly fingered her seventh veil has quite so much attention been focused on any one part of a human body.

As for Mr Berlusconi's poor opponents, they must feel like the narrator of William Hughes Mearns's wonderfully spooky ditty:

"As I was going up the stair,

I met a man who wasn't there.

He wasn't there again today.

I wish, I wish he'd stay away."