EMMA'S RECIPE ? STRONG AND SIMPLE, JUST LIKE MAMA USED TO MAKE

To some, European Commissioner Emma Bonino is the ultimate fake, driven by ambition and expert in manipulating the media. To others, her only fault is that she smokes. Emily von Sydow makes up her own mind.

She has that enviable way of tying a silk scarf that makes you feel either too elaborate or too sloppy. She knows she has style enough to criticise fellow Commissioner Karel Van Miert for his taste in ties. "When he retorted that the one I didn't like was French and bought in Rome, I told him that he had managed to find the only unattractive French tie in Rome."

Bonino is probably the most high profile member of the European Commission. Her portfolio is big and getting bigger. Initially responsible for consumer issues, she has added fisheries, humanitarian aid and, most recently, the thorny issue of food safety. Linking these diverse areas is a concern for the needs of the man and woman in the street.

Work dominates Bonino's life. I made an appointment to see her at the Commission at noon on Saturday, after a journalist told me that her hectic schedule means weekends are the best time to catch her. My mission: to find out whether beneath her media-friendly exterior, Bonino is genuinely good at her job.

She is sitting in the front passenger seat of her car, outside the Breydel building in Avenue d'Auderghem, chatting with the chauffeur. I am sure she has had her hair done, perhaps expecting a photographer. But I am alone. If she is disappointed, she does not show it. My attempts to keep a professional distance founder when confronted with Bonino's disarming ability to giggle.

We go up to her off~ce and she greets her secretary, who has bought croissants to go with coffee. While I can't wait to tuck in, Bonino appears uninterested: she eats little and rarely and it shows. She is hardly a rosy-checked picture of health.

"I eat in the evening," she says. I'm not convinced. She often looks tired and under-nourished: during negotiations with fisheries ministers at the European Council before Christmas, she collapsed from exhaustion and had to leave the meeting.

What does she eat? "I like fish, big fish. And vegetables. What do you eat?"

We talk about how Scandinavians eat to live rather than live to eat. She has the rare ability to listen intently, which gives you the impression that what you say is interesting.

Her sympathetic face is not classically beautiful: biggish nose, protruding ears. Yet her blue eyes are full of intensity. Easy to talk to, she is knowledgeable and idealistic -many of these ideals came from her elderly mother and from her father, who died when she was young.

Emma Bonino is proud of her- "how shall I say it in English?" she asks - "humble" background. Her father struggled to make ends meet on the family's small farm in Piedmont, northern Italy. "My upbringing made me strong," she says. It has also entered political folklore: her comment to Commissioner Yves-Thibault de Silguy that the single European currency had to be made understandable to people like her "old mother" made the headlines.

The simple values she inherited from her parents have guided her through life. "Honesty, loyalty, freedom only with responsibility. Do whatever you want as long as you do not harmothers."

It sounds like a bland election slogan. From someone else's mouth, it would appear trite, but Bonino gets away with it. She appears dedicated, a do-gooder without being a goodie-goodie.

Twenty years ago, Bonino had an abortion. Her doctor told her that it would cost her 1 million fire "to kill a budding life". She found a less opinionated doctor, who carried out the operation for 40,000 fire. The experience was her political wake-up call: she began campaigning for abortion and an end to double standards in social welfare.

The farmer's daughter has come a long way since then. Now she has other concerns, such as what to wear when Moroccan King Hassan II sends his private jet to pick her up. The occasion was the final agreement on fisheries between Morocco and the EU: Bonino had been a Commissioner for only nine months. She had just finished dealing with the "fish war" between Canada and the EU, which was triggered, she says by a Canadian act of "international piracy": when an EU vessel sailed into Canadian waters, patrol boats opened fire.

What did she wear to meet the Moroccan King? A black silk trouser suit. As to protocol, Bonino had been drilled in how to behave with royalty. The preparations proved unnecessary: the King turned out to be a pleasant man with whom Bonino could talk frankly.

To some in the Commission, she is the ultimate fake, driven by personal ambition and expert in manipulating the media. "Why does she get all the credit?", they ask enviously. Another nomination of Bonino as European of the Year (which she was voted by French magazine La Vie last year) or another road named after her (there is a Bonino Street on the island of Gran Canaria), and the Commission could see more than its usual share of nervous breakdowns.

"I don't know if I am given special treatment by the media," she says. That is probably rather dishonest: after important meetings, she pores over newspaper clippings with her spokesman, Filippo di Robilant.

While fellow Commissioners do not envy her success, she says, some officials several rungs down the EU ladder probably do.

Speak to officials in other directorates general (DGs) and you hear statements like: "Emma gets everything she wants. She has just got an extra cabinet member which is unheard of who is about to move into a huge new office with at least four windows. I have never seen an office like it."

Bonino's office overlooking the Cinquantenaire Park is not bad either. Among the more unusual items is the small stuffed alligator which clings to her desk lamp.

Whether her colleagues like it or not, Bonino is perhaps the only Commissioner who can sell a European message to a broad public. She is unashamedly European, and gets away with statements like "it is a European tradition to offer help".

Yet last month's press conference on how the EU could come to the aid of Albania was not a great success. Journalists tried to trick her into saying something outrageous about how the EU should handle the crisis. Di Robilant eyed her intently, as if to stifle potential outbursts. It worked. She avoided the traps - but no one understood the point of the conference.

Which is unusual. Bonino is an excellent communicator- clear, combative, clever and funny - whether talking in public, in the European Parliament, where she was an MP, or in the Commission. Those who have worked with her are impressed.

"Emma understands a brief very quickly, and can defend the interests of the Community with fervour," says one official, who worked closely with her for more than two years at the Commission. "She is pleasant to work with, although very demanding. You are on call twenty-four hours a day. For her, work comes before everything. But she is extraordinarily skilled. Her only fault is that she smokes too much."

The ashtray on her desk is full, although she has only just returned to the office after twodays away. She does not smoke much while she talks - the cigarette is more like a sixth finger. But smoking has taken its toll on her vocal cords: she sounds more like a late-night radio talk show host than a high-ranking European politician.

Early in her career, she had a reputation for being politically incorrect and anti-establishment - not the usual pedigree for European Commissioners. Power in Italy was shared between the Communists and the Christian Democrats. Both Darties dislike the small Radical party, of which Bonino was a leading member.

A party which pokes fun at established politics by sending porn queen La Cicciolina and terrorist sympathiser Toni Negro to parliament does not make friends easily. Nor did the Radical party win much sympathy when it made a deal with Silvio Berlusconi's party, Forza Italia.

But for Bonino, supporting Berlusconi paid off: the media mogul-turned-prime minister (he has since fallen from power and grace) sent her to Brussels as Italy's second Commissioner, a stark contrast to steady economics professor Mario Monti.

She was at the UN in New York when she received the call-up to the EU. One can imagine Santer's surprise, and perhaps horror, when confronted with this diminutive woman who had come hotfoot from handing out free syringes in the streets of the Big Apple, for which she was taken into custody. This was not the first time: in Italy she spent time in custody after setting up an abortion clinic without authority.

"I suspect Jacques Santer wished I were someone else," says Bonino, laughing hoarsely. I suspect he may have changed his mind.