the bigmouths of brussels

SHE'S IN FAVOUR OF ABORTION AND DRUGS BUT KNOWS NOTHING ABOUT FISHING. SO WHY IS MS BONINO BEING ALLOWED TO DESTROY OUR FLEET?

by Geoffrey Levy

It has become fashionable among Britain's chattering classes to suggest that the private life of politicians is entirely separate from, and irrelevant to, their policies.

If this is so, what are we to make of Emma Bonino, the hyperactive Euro fish commissioner known in her native Italy as 'the cyclone' and considered by many to be the most dreadful woman in Europe?

Is it possible that the cold nature of her public pronouncements, calmly slicing 40 per cent out of the livelihoods of British fishermen, has no connection with the bizarre events and disappointments in her personal life? Now 48 and unmarried chain-smoking Senorina Bonino has been in prison, had an abortion, used drugs and been called a witch by the Pope.

Between times, she fostered two little girls for nearly six years and their eventual return to their own homes left her feeling 'empty' and with what her friends call 'a solitary life'. It is an emptiness she has apparently filled by becoming a classic Brussels busybody who knows how to run everyone's life but her own.

'Drug-taking,' she declared enthusiastically just the other day, 'is a private matter, just like sleeping pills or alcohol.' Nor did she mean only soft drugs, but cocaine and heroin, on the highly questionable grounds that mafia control would be defused and young people's drugs dependence reduced.

The remark burst out with the same uncompromising certainty with which she told British fishermen that their fleets, and therefore their jobs, had to be savagely cut to conserve fish, completely ignoring the fact that 85 per cent of European fish are in British and Irish waters.

What else should we expect from a woman who tells with a kind of relish how, as a 27-yearold teacher, she and her first boyfriend, an engineer, embarked on a period of 'sex, drugs and rock and roll or whatever it was called then' when a doctor -wrongly as it turned out- told her she could not have children.

Two months later she was pregnant and, as she tells it, went back to the doctor and asked him what to do. He told her 'No problem - get married.' She told him: 'Perhaps that's your way of looking at things' and had a £150 abortion in Florence, at that time illegal. For most girls in trouble, that would have been the end of the matter. But for this fasttalking woman oozing confidence and determined to change the world, it wasn't enough. She told police about the abortion and went to prison for three weeks. But she achieved her goal - attracting attention to the antiabortion laws in Italy and eventually they were changed.

It was the first of the inexhaustible list of causes to which she would attach herself -nuclear power (against), human rights (for), famine relief (for), drug decriminalisation (for), the death penalty (against), land mines (against), Aids . . .

The climax of her radicalism came when she turned her attention to liberalising the Italian divorce laws, provoking the Pope into calling her a witch.

What on earth is this woman with zero knowledge of fish doing as a fish commissioner anyway? When summoned surprisingly to Brussels in January 1995, she was wearing a sandwich board parading in protest outside the UN headquarters in New York about the lack of Third World aid.

For some years, she had been a member of the Radicals, a small centrist party seeking to promote individualism against authoritarianism - ironically, the very opposite of her role now and for which she earns £140,000 a year, plus perks and a chauffeured car.

Her elevation came about only because the then Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi needed the support of the Radical party for his coalition in a vote of confidence. Emma was told she could have the portfolios of consumer affairs and humanitarian aid. Typically she said it wasn't enough. 'So they gave her fisheries. too.' says a fellow bureaucrat. Since then she has never looked back, particularly at the debris and dismay in her wake. She is skilful at masking an unattractive streak of superciliousness and a willingness to shock, but has been at her least sensitive on fishing rights.

Of fishermen, she has said: 'I wouldn't say they were illiterate but fishermen are not well educated.' It seems an astonishing statement to make about such aggrieved people.

Equally, when the Canadian Navy detained the Spanish trawler Estai and put on public display its illegal 80mm fishing nets capable of catching fish much smaller than the agreed 130mm, she called the Canadians 'pirates'. But then, from the moment she left the New York sidewalk to join the Euro-aristos in Brussels, she has slipped effortlessly from being a radical feminist motivated by the rights of the individual to an authoritarian champion of bureaucracy. She explains this conversion thus: 'I don't consider myself a bureaucrat, though other people may. But I have discovered that being inside, you can really change things.' But then Emma Bonino has always been a rebel since her girlhood days in Bra, a small town south of Turin. She defied her father, a farmer who believed girls did not need to be educated, and went away to read modern languages at university in Milan. She helped pay the fees by working as a mother's help in Ireland, and the U.S. where she was a shoe saleslady, as she worked on a thesis on Ma

lcolm X.

She begins her 16-hour day in her tenth-floor office by ritually taking off ankle boots and slipping into loafers. She works ceaselessly - 'Her work is her life,' says a Brussels colleague.

When she goes yachting or skindiving she is always alone.

This is surprising for a trim woman, much more attractive than her photographs suggest, with penetrating blue eyes. 'Love?' she says.

Absolutely no. My own love story ended badly 14 years ago. My companion was unable to discuss his love difficulties and rise above them to a certain level. We finished for good.'

She denies she is 'solitary' - 'Solitary, just because I'm not married? It's possible, isn't it, to have a boyfriend? Like everybody I have had a - how do you can 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.'

Giovanni, Emma's brother, says his sister has never fully got over losing the little girls, Aurora and Rugiada, whom she once fostered. 'It was about 12 years ago and the two girls were from different families who were financially in distress,' says Giovanni.

'They were about four and six and Emma wanted to help. When their families had overcome difficulties, the children were returned to them. There was also always a difficult legal situation - single people can not legally be a foster parent and there was no question of adoption.

'When the children left, Emma became very sad and lonely, for she had devoted much time and love and affection to them. For a time, my sister kept in touch with the girls whose families live in the south. Then work pressure intervened and she lost touch. I know she still thinks of them.'

For the moment, we must assume that Emma Bonino will not make any concessions to Britain's fishermen as they are slowly driven to extinction. 'Rules are rules,' she says. Not bad for someone who used to believe in the supremacy of the individual.