Giulio Tremonti

LYING on the desk in his opulent Milanese office are the Communist Manifesto and a magazine of Donald Duck comic strips. His first front-page column for Corriere della Sera, in 1986, and an oil-painting by a trade-union friend hang on the wall. On the shelves are a photograph of himself with Britain's failed Conservative, William Hague; a Bush-Cheney campaign ribbon; the framed copy of a fat cheque from a journalist who lost a libel case against him; and a photograph of a Spanish actress with the now displaced treasury minister, Vincenzo Visco, who is so heartily disliked by the new man that a sheet of paper has been stuck over his image.