Aaaaah! Silvio… How I’ve missed you.

Italian politics had simply got a bit too dull under Prodi, what with him not holding a near monopoly in the Italian media, not trying to blatantly advance his own commercial interests through his high office, not re-writing the country’s electoral laws to give his own party an advantage, never having compared a German MEP to a Nazi concentration camp guard, having no connections to the Sicilian mafia, not bribing the husband of a British cabinet minister to help him launder money and give false evidence in a trial, and not having been brought to trial countless times for corruption, false accounting, tax fraud and the like – nor ever being found guilty of perjury in a case involving the freemasons.

Great entertainment value, is Silvio. Gloriously inappropriate as a national leader for pretty much any European country other than Italy.

(Apologies for not covering the Italian elections much, by the way – great fun, but far too complicated for a non-expert to attempt to explore in the sort of detail they deserve without spending far more time than I’ve currently got doing the research… Here’s a handy bit of background, though.)