The late Silvio Berlusconi has come back from the dead –  momentarily, it is hoped – to torment Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in the guise of the old rogue’s ‘bunga bunga’ woman-in-chief.

As a result, Meloni’s opponents and their many friends in the media are baying for the blood of her justice minister Carlo Nordio in a bid to cause her fatal damage.

Italy’s 69 governments since the foundation of the Republic of Italy in 1946 have lasted on average little more than a year. Meloni’s right-wing coalition government, after three and a half years in power, became this weekend the second longest lasting in the history of the Republic. Yet for the first time it is looking a little shaky.

This is thanks to what seems on the surface to be – even though it is not – a piece of imbecilic incompetence by Nordio inspired by couldn’t-give-a-damn cronyism.

Certainly, her opponents are treating it as such. With shameless dishonesty, they are blaming him for the decision by Italian President Sergio Mattarella to pardon Nicole Minetti – the maitresse of ceremonies at Silvio Il Magnifico’s infamous ‘bunga bunga’ parties – without doing basic checks that would, they insist, have rendered the pardon inconceivable.

The Italian president, who is elected by Parliament not the people, is a largely ceremonial role but he does have the power to grant pardons. The justice minister manages the process but the decision is his.

In 2019, a court in Milan condemned Minetti to two years and ten months in prison for procuring prostitutes between 2010 and 2011 to attend what Berlusconi called ‘elegant soirées’ at his country estate outside Milan. In 2021, another court sentenced her to 13 months in prison for fiddling €19,000 worth of expenses as a regional councillor in Lombardy for Berlusconi’s party (then called Popolo della Libertà). She denied that the money Berlusconi paid these women guests was for sex. As did he and they.

Minetti, 41, is a former dental hygienist from Rimini whose mother Giorgina is British and from Newcastle. She first met Berlusconi in 2008 at a motorbike trade fair in Milan where she was a hostess on one of the stands. He was 71 and she was 23. He subsequently asked her to look after his teeth and much else besides. She fell in love with him, she would say in court, they had an affair and the rest is history.

Hardly anyone in Italy sentenced to less than four years actually goes to prison and Minetti was no........

© The Spectator