Dante’s Beach, Ravenna
I know that, as the heat intensifies, you want me to write about the highly trained nudists who have stolen the best bit of our beautiful beach and what such manifestations of diversity, equity and inclusion entail. But I’m not going to, because I feel I must write instead about Churchill and Mussolini.
In a three-hour documentary, the Italian equivalent of the BBC has (more or less) accused Churchill of ordering the execution of Mussolini on Lake Como in April 1945. His motive, apparently, was to stop the Duce making public secret wartime letters between the two of them that were very damaging to Churchill.
The documentary, called Mussolini: The Hidden Truths, was a resurrection of an old Italian fantasy that tells us more about the Italians than it does about the truth. Italy’s top TV political talk-show host was wheeled out to say that the letters exist and to ridicule the idea that in September 1945 Churchill came on holiday to Lake Como just to paint. He came to retrieve his letters.
According to this Italian fantasy, Churchill offered all sorts of highly embarrassing nonsense to Mussolini
That man is Bruno Vespa and he should hang his head in shame. My duty as a scholar and a gentleman is clear. I cannot let his fake news pass without comment. Because I speak – I kid you not – as a world expert on this subject. I have travelled to the heart of the matter.
Before I became a journalist I lived in Puglia for a couple of years, in the deep south, which made me love and hate this country. Then years later I came back to write a biography of Mussolini and I never left, because – as I have said before – in the bar next to his abandoned castle in Predappio, the village in the foothills of the Apennines where the Duce was born and is buried, I met a woman who became my wife.
The bar was 14 hairpin bends above the little town, a raunchy kind of place where there was karaoke and dancing and I once said to a girl I fancied: ‘You have the eyes of Mussolini.’ Giusy was ‘nerissima’ (very black, i.e. fascist) and proud of it, and flattered as if I had unearthed some naughty little secret. This was the effect fascism still had. And yet since the war, the council, like the region, has been run by the communists and their heirs; Sergio, a farmer, used to make slashing motions across his throat at me with a finger when he saw me talking to Giusy. But the girl who became my wife was Carla.
What had brought me to that bar was my involvement as a journalist on the Sunday Telegraph in the verification of Mussolini’s diaries, which were in the custody of Sir Anthony Havelock-Allan, and were for sale. Sir Anthony, who had produced David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), kept them inside a plastic Harrods bag in his Knightsbridge flat. They supposedly belonged to an Italian he referred to only as ‘Aldo X’. Naturally, we worried that they were fakes, like the Hitler diaries that duped the Sunday Times in 1983. The joke in the office was that every household in Italy had a spare set.
There was no way we were going to buy them, but my intrigued editor Charles Moore, cajoled by his deputy Frank Johnson, to whom I was especially close, decided we would pay for tests to authenticate them. That would provide ‘Tony’ – as his very fizzy second wife, Maria Teresa Consuelo Ruiz de Villafranca, called him – and Aldo X with fantastic publicity. And lo, so it proved, as we announced the existence of the Mussolini diaries ‘according to experts’.
But here’s le point. In the course of that investigation I came across the conspiracy theory that is known in Italy as ‘the Churchill-Mussolini correspondence’. According to this Italian fantasy, Churchill and Mussolini exchanged letters before and during the war in which Churchill offered all sorts of highly embarrassing nonsense to Mussolini.
It is also said – absurdly – that Churchill urged the Duce in 1940 to declare war against Britain and France on the side of Germany in order for Italy to tame Hitler’s demands at the peace table after Britain’s defeat, which at the time looked inevitable.
According to this Italian fantasy, Churchill offered all sorts of highly embarrassing nonsense to Mussolini
After the war, many forged Mussolini-Churchill letters came to light, all easily demonstrated to be fakes. The intent of the forgers was simple: to blame the perfidious imperialist inglesi for dragging poor little fascist Italy into the war. This suited all those Italians – a critical mass – who had backed Mussolini until he started losing battles.
Mussolini had the letters with him, it was said, when he was captured by partisans with his mistress Clara Petacci and senior fascists on Lake Como in April 1945, en route for Switzerland. The partisans shot them dead and brought their bodies to Milan, where they were strung upside down from the girders of a petrol station.
As Bruno Vespa told the host of the documentary: ‘The correspondence exists. There were 62 letters and they were found in Mussolini’s bag and they were sold by a partisan to an officer of the British secret services. After which, a gentleman disguised as a tourist called Winston Churchill… burned them in the fireplace at his hotel.’
The documentary presenter then says: ‘So the idea that Churchill came to paint pictures…?’ By way of reply, Vespa laughs.
Italy is a strange country where, yes, the conspiracy theorist is often right. Yet it goes beyond that. The Italians want to believe that conspiracy theories are right because without them life is so awfully boring.
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