The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera recently shed another little shaft of light onto our prime minister's personality - and that of his wife. Cherie Blair is now under attack for the size of her fee for a charity tour of Australia in comparison with the funds actually raised for the children's cancer charity. Corriere's story concerned the steady flow of jewellery and gifts from premier Silvio Berlusconi to Tony and Cherie Blair since they were famously feted at his Sardinian villa and treated to a fireworks display reading "Viva Tony".

Gifts between government leaders are as old as history. Berlusconi's, however, are apparently aimed to satisfy some insatiable lust for the trappings of wealth: watches, earrings, a necklace, ring and bracelet. Corriere duly dubbed the Blairs "The Sultans of Bling". Under protocol, Berlusconi's gifts can be worn, but remain the property of Downing Street - apart from two watches, which caught the Blairs' fancy so much that they invoked Whitehall procedure to purchase them for £350 each.

The relationship with Berlusconi is one of three friendships which are crucial to Blair and say something significant about him - the others being with George Bush and Rupert Murdoch. José Maria Aznar was another important friend before he was defeated in the last Spanish election, and Downing Street was certainly (perhaps literally) praying for Germany's Margaret Thatcher and chancellor-to-be, Angela Merkel, to join Blair's conservative coterie.

Murdoch came first, even before 1997. It was in defence of that alliance that Alastair Campbell was notably economical with the truth, over Blair's call to Italian prime minister Romano Prodi in 1998, furthering Murdoch's ambitions - in Berlusconi's fiefdom. Now Murdoch's inroads into British television are championed by Blair, while the prime minister's guarantees to Murdoch on the euro are rewarded with backing from the Times and Sun, while their owner praises Blair as "extraordinarily courageous" on the war in Iraq. Blair's friendship with the owner of the rabid Fox Television surfaced again over the BBC's coverage of New Orleans.

Blair once admitted to a reliable contact of mine that he felt far closer to George Bush than he ever did to Bill Clinton. Some chemistry welded Blair, head prefect of Europe, to Bush, heir to the imperial machine that binds oil and power in Texas, America, then the world; it was tangible whenever they appeared together; and it was clear even from the body language that Blair would do Bush's bidding.

Berlusconi is perhaps the most unexpected of these pivotal friendships, and thereby the most definitive of Blair. It is an apparently curious closeness, between the billionaire mass-media mogul, member of the terrifying P2 masonic lodge, forever skirting the law and changing it to suit his ends ... and the Labour leader elected in 1997 not least for his untaintedness. Between the man who made his fortune by building an empire based on trash television and dancing girls, and the devout Christian installed in Downing Street. When Berlusconi first came to power in 1994, we suspected, but could not prove, that the "special secretary" managing his Forza Italia campaign, Marcello Dell'Utri, was mobilising the blood-stained voting clout of the Mafia - for which he was jailed last December. And Dell'Utri's patron was the man Blair this summer called his closest friend in Europe.

The construction of Berlusconi's palatial villa in which the Blairs stayed (built specially for their visit), was under criminal investigation at the time, for allegedly having been built illegally, but why should Blair or Berlusconi care? The latter simply passed an amnesty law exempting all hitherto "abusively" constructed buildings.

Now comes Angela Merkel. Prime minister Blair publicly endorsed the Social Democrat chancellor Gerhardt Schröder. But messages were eagerly dispatched from Downing Street to Merkel's election campaign not to take this too seriously. Blair had been encouraging Merkel for months. Apart from Blair's rift with Germany over Iraq, Merkel's backing for Blair over Britain's EU rebate caused a row between Merkel and Schröder. When Blair went to Berlin recently, he pulled off a brazen breach of protocol by hosting Merkel at the British embassy before meeting Chancellor Schroeder.

Presumably, Blair courts these captains of the political right not just because he needs their power or is enamoured by their wealth, but because they stand for something within him. And Ms Merkel was all the more important after the defeat of Blair's chum Aznar (to whose daughter's lavish wedding Blair and Berlusconi both hurried).

Now Merkel stands on the edge of becoming the first woman chancellor of Germany - and the latest market-driven conservative to feel the Blair embrace. But Berlusconi faces a tough election soon, and maybe the Blairs will have to buy their own bling. If Berlusconi loses, it will be to none other than Romano Prodi - so the wheel will have come full circle, and Blair will again be able to make representations on Murdoch's behalf, without having to deal direct with the man this would offend - his by then ousted pal, Berlusconi.