LADY WHO IS NOT FISHING FOR COMPLIMENTS

BORIS JOHNSON the Monday interview

Emma Bonino has one main qualification to be Fisheries Commissioner: she likes eating fish.

Emma Bonino strikes again. We do not know what she said to Raymond Robertson on friday, but it sent the young Scottish Office minister off the deep end. He had never been so "insulted", he raged to the Press Association. He had flown out to Brussels to give the Fish Commissioner a few paragraphs in her ear about the plight of Scottish salmon, and do you know what, she'd kicked him out after 20 minutes!

Barely the time he had spent waiting for his luggage at Heathrow. Who does she think she is? The fish queen? The Eva Peron of the halibut? This is the woman the Pope once called a witch, and whom the sceptics have wittily baptised "Signora Banana", the woman who will be presiding over next week's crucial Fisheries Council in Brussels, once again demanding a 40 per cent cut in the British catch, kicking our fishermen out of their ancient livelihoods while tonne after tonne of edible fish is thrown back into the sea un the name of the quota system.

But before we can launch into her crazy policies, she must be softened up. No doubt through the superior pulling power of the press, I have more than twice as long as Ray Robertson. "There is no rush" La Bonino keeps saying, patting my knee as we sit in the EU Commission's "embassy" in Storey's Gate, Westminster with its leather upholstery and by-the-yeard shelves of titles like the Game Directory 1907.

"When I was appointed the fishermen said, 'They despise us so much that they have put a lady in charge of fisheries! And on top of that she says she knows nothing about fish!'" But, er, didn't you admit that you knew nothing? "I cannot pretend I was ever expert on fish. Not even my mother would say that." You do like eating fish, though? "Yes."

That, I think, is her only qualification for the job, that and her membership of the Italian Radical Party. By sheer fluke the Radicals, a fringe group of mavericks, found themselves the only politicians left standing after the neutron bomb of the Italian corruption scandals. In 1994 Italy suddenly needed a Commissioner, and when Norway voted against joining the EU, the fisheries post became vacant.

Enter Bonino, born 48 years ago in the town of Bra (sic) near the northern city of Turin hence the blue eyes and blonde hair. She made her name campaigning for abortion. At 28 she became pregnant, had the baby aborted, was arrested, went on hunger strike and ended up changing the law. She doesn't regret it. "All women would prefer contraception. We are not so stupid and so masochistic as to prefer abortion to a birth pill. But in my country up to 1972 contraception was not legal, and so the amount of illegal abortion was enormous; and I thought it was un ipocrisia."

Nor does she regret her continued calls for the legalisation of drugs, or the adoption of porn star La Cicciolina as her runningmate. "She is no stupider than most MPs," she says. Bonino reached the Italian parliament and then, in 1979, the Euro-parliament; and now the Commission, where her hands are wrapped around the levers of European power and 140,000 per year.

Was she happy to be appointed? "I wasn't happy from a personal point of view," says the unmarried Bonino, offering me a Muratti cigarette and sliding off the sofa in a kind of squat-thrust. "I used to live in Brussels so I had no expectation of going to an exciting city." Come come, I say. Brussels has its points. "Oh yeah? I miss something?"

It seems she doesn't like the weather. "I am used to a terrace in Rome. When you get to nearly 50 you have habits, and normally in Rome I have breakfast at 7.30 on my terrace with coffee and milk and yoghurt with my flowers. And now I am in Brussels I also have breakfast on my terrace. Except in Brussels I must have an umbrella. And I have geraniums,which are almost the only thing which grows in Brussels. "

Well, I think, that's just too bad. But that's enough chit-chat. What are you doing to our fishermen, eh? "I did not deplete the fish. You did, you and your fellow countrymen. Altogether we have been fishing too much. There was a man who could multiply fish, but he disappeared." In Bonino's view. you either have a free market system, in which fishermen learn non to cut their own throats by over-fishing; or else you manage the industry to keep stocks and fishermen in balance.

But isn't the point that 85 per cent of European fish are in British waters, and that they are being plundered by these 160 Spanish and Dutch quota-hoppers? Why can't we scrap the Common Fisheries Policy, renationalise our 200-mile territorial waters. and make reciprocal arrangements with any foreign fishermen we choose?

"But apparently we are a Union. If a Brit comes to Italy and grows olive oil, this will be counted as part of the national quota. It is a fundamental freedom", she says. Get away, I tell her. No Italian olive oil co-operative is going to admit a Brit, even if it is Lord Gilmour in Chiantishire. The fisheries policy is a fundamentally confused mixture of national quotas within common waters. The most elegant solution, surely, is to end the quotas and repatriate the waters.

Mr Major has demanded that the current inter-governmental conference consider an end to quota-hopping; and yet one cannot help brooding that IGC will not end until after the election. . .

"Did I convince you?" asks La Bonino after we have wrangled to a standstill. No, I say. She's defending the indefensible. She's wrong. But she's very likeable.