Emma Bonino tells Christian Tyler how she progressed from the Italian Radical party to becoming a big fish in the European Commission

FINANCIAL TIMES - weekend FT, page XVIII, photo Bonino (Emma Bonino lit a cigarette, the first of many, and said: "My passion is how individuals can change society")

The way she tells it frank, funny and angry by turns - Emma Bonino would not be where she is today, sitting in a big office in Brussels as a Commissioner of the European Union, but for a remark made to her by a doctor in Milan in 1975.

She was a 27-year-old schoolteacher at the time, the daughter of "poor peasants", who had put her. self through university with her mother's connivance.

She had an engineer boyfriend who was, she recalled, "a little bit straightforward - you know, a square kind of guy - who wanted to marry me. Luckily, he didn't - I mean luckily for the two of us." She laughed.

``Before having sexual intercourse we had gone to the and he said 'I'm sorry, but you're sterile'."

"Well," she continued in her idiosyncratic but fluent English, "I was a little bit not so happy. So we decided to have 'sex and drugs and rock-and-roll' or whatever it was called then.

"After two months it turned out it was the doctor who was sterile. Because I was certainly pregnant."

The couple went back and asked the doctor what next. He told Bonino there was no problem. She should get married; she was old enough, she had a degree and she could work.

"I said: 'That's maybe your way of looking at things.' He said - I can't translate this literally because it's something that I will never forget in my life - 'If you want to kill a life in bloom, una vita in fiore, it will cost you one million lire.'

"That sentence I will never forget, and not only because I didn't have L1m - my boyfriend neither -but because it was so bluntly said."

Bonino had been a foreign languages student at Milan's Bocconi University in the revolutionary year of 1968 but had taken no interest in politics ("I don't even remember it happening"). Now, she said, she became infuriated by the hypocrisy of a system which declared abortion a crime yet permitted women in trouble to be so exploited.

No doubt Emma Bonino was headstrong from the start. She was born in the small town of Bra, south of Turin, the kind of place where going to church was the social highlight of the week. Her father ("a very strange kind of person but I loved him very much") saw no reason for girls to be bothering with high school or university but was persuaded to let her go.

His daughter had an even better idea. She asked to do a course not offered at Turin university so that she could study in far-off Milan and avoid coming home each night. There she became a mother's help to pay her fees, won a scholarship and spent three years working in Ireland and the US.

While in New York to research a thesis on Malcolm X, the Black Power leader, she found a job selling shoes in Carrano's elegant boutique on Fifth Avenue. It was undemanding: the shoes came in little Italian sizes - "So unless we could find some Chinese customers we had nothing to do."

Back in Italy the trauma of her unwanted pregnancy and the subsequent abortion, carried out for her for L30,000 by a "nice" doctor in Florence, prompted her to become a volunteer ina private -and legal family planning clinic.

In one of her first acts of civil disobedience, she moved to an abortion clinic, then illegal. She told the police what she had done, succeeded in getting prosecuted and managed to serve three weeks in jail as part of a national campaign to change the law.

In 1975 she was asked to become a candidate for the Radicals, a small centrist party seeking to promote an individualist society against what she calls the authoritarianism of the Christian Democrats on the right and the Communists on the left. She was five times elected to the Chamber of Deputies and twice to the European Parliament.

Name a cause, and Bonino has campaigned about it: nuclear power, famine relief, human rights, divorce, drug decriminalisation, the death penalty, land mines, AIDs. If you were ungenerous you might say she was a serially single-issue politician. I asked her: Do you want to change the world or do you just have a talent for politics?

She lit a cigarette, the first of many. "Are you asking me if this is a job or a passion? It comes down to this. I don't know when I developed a real passion for politics, but my passion is how individuals can change society, notwithstanding big parties and big bureaucracy."

In that case, I said, aren't you in the wrong place here?

"No, it's exactly the right place. It's quite a privilege to be here," she added innocently.

Looking around the office I could not help but agree. But where, I asked, was the radical politician now?

Bonino became serious. "I discovered that to serve your ideals you need two things: institutions but also pressure from outside. So after 1976 I began to couple the two souls which are deeply rooted in me.

`'I believe in institutions. I think they are needed. I believe in rules. I am not anarchica.

You also need pressure from outside, non-violent campaigning," she continued. "Because institutions have an almost irresistible trend to become introverted. They even invent a particular language which is understandable only on the inside - like in computers, or sailing."

Do you consider yourself a bureaucrat?

"Oh, no, I don't consider myself a bureaucrat, though other people may. When I was in the European parliament I thought the commission was a bureaucratic job. Now I have discovered, being inside, that you really can change things. Everything here is non-partisan, but it is politics. I discovered this to my astonishment and pleasure. From a personal point of view I was not happy to be appointed here."

Bonino owed her unexpected appointment in 1995 to Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian premier, who needed to woo the Radical party for his coalition. Colleagues in Brussels fearful of what the hotheaded Italian might get up to have been generally enthusiastic about her, describing her as exhilarating but sensible.

I asked how she was getting on with the other commissioners. Had they discovered...

". . . the institutional soul of Miss Bonino!" she interrupted. "I made them discover my second soul."

Her portfolio has three oddlyassorted parts: fisheries, which she acquired almost by accident, with a budget of Ecu880m ($1.1bn) last year; humanitarian aid (Ecu692m disbursed worldwide), and the poor relation, consumer affairs (Ecu20m).

Of the three, fisheries has given fullest rein to her undoubted talent for confrontation and plain speaking. ("There's not enough fish for everybody," she said. "The fishermen have been greedy. We have to cut the fleet. We have to modernise.")

But humanitarian aid is the cause closest to her heart. An incessant traveller, she came under fire on a visit to Somalia, flew into the war zone after the Bosnian Serbs captured Srebrenica, and wants soon to visit the Burmese opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.

She is anxious to dispel the notion that aid is a substitute for political initiative in worldtronblespots, that it should be seen as conscience money. For her it is the visible expression of civilised European values, a counterweight to the EU's economic obsessions.

"Showing solidarity is part of the European identity," she declared. Indeed, her chief ambition seems to be to bring Brussels closer to the citizens of Europe, to convince them the EU is more than a benefit match for multinational companies and banks.

I asked her about her own ambition. Did she want another Commission portfolio?

"Is the Pope still alive?"

Yes, but there is concern about his health.

Bonino gave a shriek of glee and was about to answer when the young chef de cabinet who had been listening in the background intervened to steer his boss round the trap. "Emma very much feels the responsibility of being the first Radical to reach this position...," he intoned.

"Yes," said the Commissioner, taking her cue. "You are right, Filippo. A radical can be good in government - not only screaming but also really managing. To have ideas doesn't mean that you are a visionary, that you are mad. You can have ideas and also be a good manager. Ideas help you to be a good manager."

So I tried again. How would your ideals survive if you were given the budget, or external affairs?

She clapped her hands. "Good. External affairs. Fantastic. Foreign policy, that's the real thing."

Would that require more realpolitik?

"Sure. But I'm not Don Quixote even if I like very much Don Quixote." .

Would you like one day to go back to Italian politics?

"No."

And that was about as far as she would go.

Clearly it was not the engineer's fault, but Bonino never did get married. For five years, however, she was foster mother to two little girls from broken homes. By an unhappy coincidence the girls were returned to their respective families in the same week, and the house fell silent.

Emboldened by her earlier frankness I asked Bonino whether she had filled the silence with a resident man or had led a solitary life.

She was shocked at the naivety. "What do you mean 'a solitary life'? Because I'm not married? It's possible, isn't it, to have a boyfriend?"

It is, I agreed.

"Like everybody, I have had a how do you call them? - a 'resident' for a long time, and then he wasn't resident any more and he left. And for the moment I am waiting for another one. But they are difficult to find, you know."

I asked just in case you were planning to get married on Monday . .

She shrieked with laughter. "I've resisted 48 years. Too late! Even my mother has given up any hope at all. So..."