Daily Mail, London, July 4, 2003, page 57:

"He was a great man."

He was, says Farrell, "a great man who failed, not half as bad as he has been painted, certainly not an evil".

Can he make good such a surprising degree of admiration? Farrell claims that Mussolini took power peacefully and ruled Italy for 20 years by popular consent, without repression or any resistance worth the name until Hitler’s war brought disaster on him and his country.

The Italians being a people for whom democracy was a recipe for chaotic misgovernment, Mussolini’s brand of Fascism had popular appeal.

He got things done and made the Italians feel proud of themselves. Most important of all was his operatic charisma and sex appeal. ...

Not only Italian women admired him. From the Twenties and Thirties, Farrell quotes glowing opinions of him from British politicians. After being "charmed by his gentle and simple bearing" when they met in 1927, Winston Churchill declared.

Churchill’s wife, Clementine, had already been knocked sideways by Mussolini's "beautiful, golden-brown, piercing eyes, which you can't look at". There are testimonials here from the Pope, Chamberlain and many others.

Why, then, did this one-time paragon of a leader come to such a bad end, his body strung up by the heels to be jeered at and desecrated by the crowed? ... Mussolini made his fatal error when he joined Germany in the "Pact of Steel", in the hope of controlling the Führer. He then threw Italy into Hitler’s war in June 1940, on what then looked like the winning side. He did it out of fear, and greed for territory. ...

Yes, he came to power without firing a shot. Italy’s diminutive king Victor Emmanuel, made him prime minister in 1922 because every other politician had failed.

Mussolini’s famous "March on Rome" actually consisted of his taking a train there, as did most of his followers in their black shirts, like an unruly crowed of football supporters. Mussolini arrived wearing a starched collar and white spats - hardly the gear Lenin would have chosen.

Yes, he made the trains run on time, and a lot faster thanks to electrification. And he had the first autostrada built, and the first "people's car", the Fiat Topolino, produced. Neo-classical railway stations and sports complexes sprang up, and public works projects helped temper the Depression. He even introduced a basic form of welfare state.

This was the acceptable face of Fascism - a movement which described itself as the Third Way, neither capitalist nor communist, but "corporatist". <end>

Mussolini: A New Life
by Nicholas Farrell
(Weidenfeld + Nicolson, £ 25