Silvio Berlusconi’s wife Veronica files for divorce

Silvio Berlusconi's wife of 19 years, Veronica Lario, has had enough: according to reports in the Sunday editions of La Stampa and La Repubblica, she is filing for divorce.

The last straw, it seems, was the 72-year-old Italian premier's attendance last Sunday at the 18th birthday party of a blonde model when - as his wife put it - he never attended his own daughters' 18th birthdays. "That's enough, I cannot remain with a man who consorts with minors", she said.

Lario, once a minor film and stage actress, is the media tycoon turned politician's second wife. Berlusconi issued a short statement saying: "It's a personal issue that pains me, that is in the private sphere, and which seems necessary not to speak about."

The divorce has been a while coming. Two years ago, Berlusconi had to apologise to his wife publicly after telling the TV starlet Mara Carfagna: "If I weren't married, I would marry you immediately." Carfagna is now minister for equal opportunities.

Last week, Berlusconi was in trouble again for apparently proposing a number of models, TV starlets and beauty queens to represent his Freedom Party in the upcoming European elections. In an email to an Italian news agency, Lario said the plan was "shameless rubbish for the emperor's entertainment".

In the event, when the list of candidates was released, of all the glamorous names mooted only a former Miss Italy contestant was included. But the damage had already been done by Berlusconi, when he said that candidates standing for his party would be unlike the "malodorous and badly dressed people who represent certain parties in parliament".

There seems no doubt that it was her husband's visit to Naples last Sunday for the birthday party of Noemi Letizia that prompted the divorce decision. Letizia has posed for magazines semi-nude and said in interviews that she calls the prime minister "daddy". It was too much for Lario. "I'd like to close the curtain on our married life," she told La Repubblica.

Berlusconi met Lario in 1980, when she was 24. They had three children together before marrying in 1990. "When we met, she made me lose my mind," he once told a women's magazine. "She has been and is a wonderful mother. She has never embarrassed me, never." Unfortunately, the same could not be said for Silvio. ·