Silvio Berlusconi: world awaits the final aria

The stories of the Italian prime minister's not-so-private life shift from the bizarre to the grotesque. The latest sees Silvio Berlusconi accused by colleagues and media of conniving at the release of a 17-year-old Moroccan belly dancer called Ruby after she had been arrested for allegedly stealing €3,000.
 
A 'friend' of the prime minister is said to have phoned a senior police officer in Milan to say the girl was a granddaughter of President Mubarak of Egypt and should be released to avoid a diplomatic incident.

In truth, Karima El Mahroug, aka 'Ruby', is the daughter of poor Moroccan immigrants who has done her time as a lap dancer and is now known to have attended Berlusconi's private parties, involving a bevy of escorts and wannabe TV starlets.
 
Another aspiring showgirl, Nadia Macri, has also popped up to claim that she was paid €10,000 for sex on jaunts to Berlusconi's villa in Sardinia and to his palatial home at Arcore outside Milan.

She said the guests at Villa Certosa in Sardinia, numbering about 25 young women, were liberally supplied with marijuana. "There was grass available in all the rooms," she told investigators in transcripts published in the Italian press. "It had been brought in on the prime minister's private jet. I saw a number of guests smoking, but never the prime minister."

All this follows earlier allegations of callgirls being summoned to the prime minister's parties.
 
The stories are punctuated with weird details. 'Ruby' said that when she visited the 74-year-old premier at his Arcore lair "he showed us a marble statue of  Superman that his (Berlusconi's) face".

Often Berlusconi has seemed to revel in the lurid glow of sex romps at the Sardinian villa where he has entertained the Blairs and Vladimir Putin. But this time things may be different.

His former coalition partner Gianfranco Fini, now speaker of the lower house of parliament, has demanded that Berlusconi resign if he was involved in the illegal release of Karima El Mahroug - as this an abuse of prime ministerial powers and a criminal matter.

Berlusconi has struck back by claiming he is being framed. "No one can rule out with certainty that certain things that are happening are not the fruits of an underworld vendetta," he said.

In the past two days, police across central Italy and Sicily have rounded up members of three large crime families originating in Catantia in Sicily. There has also been a major round-up of Camorra associates in Naples, including the seizure of huge amounts of cash.
 
Italians are increasingly fed up with the man who has been their prime minister four times. Once they admired his success and wealth, but this cloys as the country faces rising unemployment and curbs on pensions and welfare payments to cure the fiscal deficit.

Something more sinister appears to be at work, too. Not only is Gianfranco Fini jockeying to depose Berlusconi, but so too are his old allies of the Northern League led by Umberto Bossi.

The League movement, which would like to see Italy as a loose federation, has now got a huge following in central Italy, and even some parts of the south. It is possible 'La Lega' or 'leghisomo' would emerge as the largest single bloc if elections were held tomorrow.

Berlusconi is already tuning up his media, which includes the main national channel of state television, RAI, for early elections in March. Going to the polls is his trusted route for getting out of trouble with the law.

Next month, however, the law is likely to provide yet more showtime for lurid tales of his private life when his divorce from his second wife, Veronica Lario, goes to court. Unexpectedly, she has decided to contest the case.

"In a way that may be just what he wants," a journalist working for a Berlusconi network told me in Rome last month – speaking anonymously for fear of retribution. "The divorce will divert attention from perhaps far more serious investigations."

That is code for looking at quite how Berlusconi became the richest man in Italy, under the patronage of the late prime minister Bettino Craxi. Craxi died in exile in Tunisia, after fleeing serious corruption charges.

This time the fat lady may be about to sign the final aria of Silvio Berlusconi's highly operatic political career, and it could be from behind bars. ·