Nicholas Burgess Farrell (born 2 October 1958) is a British journalist working as a columnist for The Spectator. After starting his career in England at The Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator, he moved to Italy, where he wrote among others for La Voce di Romagna, Libero, and Il Giornale. In Italy, Farrell is best known for his 2003 interview with Silvio Berlusconi, the then prime minister of Italy. According to Farrell, Berlusconi stated that the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini never killed anyone and that he was a benevolent dictator. Berlusconi later said that his words had been manipulated by Farrell, who stood by his reporting; the interview and other controversial statements by Berlusconi about the Italian judiciary came close to cause an institutional crisis.
During his career, Farrell's columns at Libero earned him both supporters and critics as they often aroused controversy. He also wrote several books. In 2003, Farrell wrote Mussolini: A New Life, an historical revisionist biography of Mussolini that attracted mixed-to-negative reviews; it was translated and re-published in multiple languages. In 2013, he wrote another book about Mussolini, this time in Italian, where he promoted the fringe theory that fascism and Nazism were left-wing rather than far-right. Farrell continued to work at The Spectator, where he interviewed future prime minister Giorgia Meloni in 2022 and began writing "Dolce vita" columns in 2024, reporting on local goings-on from Ravenna in his adopted home of Emilia-Romagna, having lived in the Italian region since 1998.
Early life and career Farrell was born in London on 2 October 1958. He attended The King's School, Canterbury, and studied history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, earning his B.A. on 20 June 1980. He completed his apprenticeship and earned the National Certificate in Newspaper Journalism following his National Certificate Examination exam in October 1984. Farrell worked as journalist for the Telegraph Publishing Limited at The Sunday Telegraph from 1987 to 1996, later moving to The Spectator from April 1996 to July 1998.
In 2003, Farrell attracted international attention for his interview with Berlusconi. At that time, Berlusconi was in his second term as prime minister of Italy, which started in June 2001 and ended in May 2006 (of his three terms, this one was the longest), and was also the head of the rotating Presidency of the Council of the European Union, not releasing any interviews. The interview was published in The Spectator with the title "Forza Berlusconi!"
Interview with Silvio Berlusconi In August 2003, Farrell had a three-hour interview with Berlusconi in his Sardinian palace in Porto Rotondo, alongside Boris Johnson, the future mayor of London and prime minister of the United Kingdom who at that time was editor of The Spectator and a MP from the Conservative Party. In the interview, Berlusconi made statements that were widely summarised or reported as "Mussolini wasn't that bad" in line with the well-known Italian myth that he also did good things (), including the claim that Saddam Hussein was worse than Mussolini as Berlusconi was discussing Iraq and that Italian judges were "mentally disturbed", and sparked criticism and controversy in Italy when excerpts were published.
More specifically, in the second part of the interview that was published in September 2003 by The Spectator and La Voce di Rimini, where Farrell worked as a editor, after being asked by Farrell if Mussolini was a benevolent dictator, Berlusconi was quoted as saying: "Yes ... Mussolini never killed anyone. Mussolini sent people on holiday to confine them [banishment to small islands such as Ponza and Maddalena which are now plush resorts]." This view, which was defended by some of Berlusconi's supporters and Berlusconi himself within the context of a comparison to another dictator, is not supported by scholarly consensus, with one scholarly estimate being around one million deaths as a result of Mussolini's rule in Italy, Ethiopia, Lybia, and Yugoslavia. Berlusconi was criticised for having apparently forgotten the murder of Giacomo Matteotti and Blackshirts and Squadrismo violence, and the opposition accused him of apology for fascism, which is a crime in Italy. On 18 September, Il Foglio criticised Berlusconi as "weak" for not having openly apologised to the Jewish community.
The controversial statements came after Farrell and Johnson asked Berlusconi whether the then United States president George W. Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair had told him that Iraq had weapons capable of hitting the West in 45 minutes. Berlusconi said that he did not talk directly to them about this and that there was a major problem of the West's relations with the Muslim and Middle Eastern world, citing the lack of democracy and that they had known no other system than dictatorship, at which point Farrell interjected by saying: "Like Italy?" Berlusconi told Farrell, "Let's leave it at that, it was a dictatorship much more...", at which point Farrell interjected, "Benevolent", while the prime minister's interpreter said, "Or benign". At this point, Berlusconi made the controversial statements about Mussolini, after which he said: "Aside from that, the discussion here becomes broader: we are facing a new world scenario. The West's opposition to the Warsaw Pact is over. Now the Russian Federation has decided, through Putin, to join the West; this is a great thing..."
In the same interview, for which Farrell is best known in Italy, Berlusconi publicly swore the innocence of Marcello Dell'Utri, who at that time was charged for colluding with the Sicilian Mafia, describing him as a "Catholic, a believer, and a man of culture, with an outstanding family and a well-off father". He said that Dell'Utri was a victim of the "crazy communist judiciary", and that his only fault was of trusting people he did not know were notorious mafiosi, questioning the legitimacy of the crime of aiding and abetting (or complicity from the outside) a mafia-type association (). When the first excerpts from the two-part interview were published in Italy on the newspaper La Voce, Berlusconi stated that his words had been manipulated by Farrell, whom he described as a "criminal", that the interview had been a bunch of small talk with some friends, and that he was "a little tipsy" from drinking two bottles of champagne. Farrell denied the accusations and gave a summary of the conditions of the interview, stating that Berlusconi himself asked when and where the article was expected to be published, that the interview set-up took several weeks, and that the talk was recorded on tape. He denied any drinking of alcohol at the interview since only lemon tea was served at their table. Farrell ended his rebuttal by telling Berlusconi to "be good" as the publication of a third-part interview was ready. Although the interview almost caused an institutional crisis, public opinion eventually moved away from the controversy to Berlusconi's pension reform.
Columnist and editor In 2007, Farrell joined the Italian Order of Journalists, at first working for the local newspaper La Voce di Romagna. He later worked for the national daily newspaper Libero. As a columnist of Libero, which often attracted controversy for its headlines, Farrell wrote a number of provocatory articles, including that he wished his son not to be gay but that being gay was better than being a communist, that there was a link between the hatred of Jews and that of smokers, that he wanted to personally torture rapists with a chainsaw, asserted his right as a parent to kick and slap his children, drove around drunk, argued that Gianfranco Fini was a Nazi and thus a leftist, criticised the perceived moralism regarding Berlusconi controversies in his private life and downplayed the seriousness of Berlusconi's sexual behaviour, and stated the well-known Italian myth often repeated by Berlusconi that "communists eat children" () was true, all of which led to controversy or criticism. After the 7 July 2005 London bombings, Farrell wrote an article on La Voce di Romagna about Simona Pari and Simona Torretta, two UNICEF volunteers kidnapped in 2004 by Shia militants in Iraq. Following the Italian government's negotiation of their release, they urged their government to withdraw its troops from Iraq and criticised the U.S. occupation of Iraq. As a result, Farrell called them traitors and described them as "viscid sewer bugs" who were "accomplices to terrorists". Farrell was sued for the defamatory comments by Pari and was later sentenced to four months' jail time (a suspended sentence) and fined €25,000 in punitive damages.
Other provocatory or controversial claims made by Farrell in his columns, including at Il Giornale, were that Mussolini had popular support, that he was not like Adolf Hitler and the Italian fascists saved many Jews, that fascism was left-wing, and that the Italian Resistance was a military minority in the conflict and that its communist components, which fought for the liberation of Italy and were part of the Constituent Assembly that wrote the democratic Italian Constitution, were fighting for the Soviet Union and dictatorship. In his August 2010 column for Libero about the Holocaust and anti-smoking activism, which he linked by saying that both Mussolini and Hitler hated smoking, Farrell wrote: "The German National Socialists hated Jews because they were bankers and small businessmen, symbols of the hated capitalism. It's no coincidence that the anti-Semites masquerading as anti-Zionists are left-wing, and even today they hate Israel and flirt with Islamic fascists who subjugate men and women in the name of the state." He argued that heavy smokers and drinkers like him were prosecuted by "health fascists" just like the Jews were prosecuted in the Holocaust.
Also in August 2010, Farrell called Fini, at that time president of the Chamber of Deputies, a "National Socialist". It was observed that Farrell did not merely mean to use the fascist label as an insult but tried to justify it on the merits. This came after another Libero column written a few days earlier by Giampaolo Pansa had called Fini a "fascist-communist". Although Fini had been a member of the Italian Social Movement (a neo-fascist party founded by Mussolini's followers), he renounced fascism as leader of the post-fascist National Alliance (AN) in the 1990s and went to Jerusalem to apologise for the Holocaust. According to Farrell, "Fini has only done two right-wing (in the Anglo-Saxon sense) things recently: (1) he went to Jerusalem to apologise for the Shoah; (2) he smokes", which could be interpreted to mean that the Holocaust and anti-smoking activism were left-wing. It was also observed that the January 2003 legislation related to the smoking ban in all indoor public places was introduced by Girolamo Sirchia, a Berlusconi minister (at that time Minister of Health), during the second Berlusconi government and not by Fini or the left. Despite the criticism and controversy related to some of his columns, Farrell earned a following of supporters; rather than indignate, the reading of some of his columns was considered to be fun.