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.

Normal people cannot help but wonder why on earth an Italian president is granting a pardon to someone like her, who has not spent even one single day in prison

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 councilor 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 exception. Her sentence was commuted to community service.

Normal people cannot help but wonder why on earth an Italian president is granting a pardon to someone like her, who has not spent even one single day in prison. Her partner is the billionaire Giuseppe Cipriani Jr. – heir to the Cipriani deluxe global hotel and hospitality empire which began life at legendary Harry’s Bar in Venice, founded by his grandfather in 1931.

In February 2025, Minetti applied for clemency to the president after she and Cipriani adopted a boy in Uruguay in 2023 where she and Cirpriani spend much of their time. He agreed that if she had to do nearly four years community service she could not look after him.

Mattarella granted the pardon in February this year on humanitarian grounds related to the poor state of health of the nine-year-old boy who has spina bifida. The boy’s health issues, however, do not stop the couple spending most of their time in Uruguay at his ranch, or Montecarlo, or Italy, or else on his yacht, which is called Gin Tonic. Boyfriend Cipriani knew Jeffrey Epstein well, it has also emerged, and is mentioned over a hundred times in the Epstein files.

In particular, the files show that in October 2010, not long after Epstein had completed a prison sentence for prostituting an underage girl, Epstein agreed to lend Cipriani £800,000. The loan – to be repaid at a hefty 10 percent a year interest rate over three years – was to help Cipriani buy a private members club in Hay Lane Mayfair called Rififi. Cipriani changed the name to Socialista and restyled it as a Cuban-themed venue inspired, in the words of its website, by “how the privileged pre-revolution Habaneros lived.”

Well before this crisis blew up Cipriani issued a carefully worded statement in March to the New York Post in which he said of Epstein that he “actually found him unlikable” and had “never made any business deals with him.”

I would have thought that this relationship alone, would have been enough at least to question the merit of Minetti’s plea for clemency, or am I too falling victim of the herd mentality by unfairly baying for the blood of anyone who did business with Epstein?

What caused the affair to engulf the Meloni government was the publication by Il Fatto Quotidiano, a left-wing Rome daily, of evidence that suggests Minetti may not have told the truth in her request for clemency about the circumstances surrounding the adoption and her new life.

The newspaper also interviewed anonymous witnesses, including one claiming to have worked for many years at the ranch, who allege that she runs bunga bunga style parties for jet-setters at the couple’s home in Uruguay.

Not surprisingly left-wing opposition parties and many Italian TV talk shows are pointing the finger relentlessly at Nordio even though only the President, not the justice minister, can grant a pardon.

The justice minister, though he or she expresses an opinion, merely acts as a go between. It is the President alone who decides based on the recommendation of a panel of judges which he can override. So if there has been any fault, it lies with the President and the judges, not the justice minister.

But Meloni’s opponents are not going to let that get in the way of a great story.

That the role of the Italian president is largely ceremonial has made it easier for them to pretend that leftish Mattarella is the victim, not the culprit. The articles in Il Fatto Quotidiano prompted him to ask the judges, via the justice minister, to do “urgent checks” on the case.

When Sigfrido Ranucci, a left-wing investigative television journalist whose programs are notoriously biased, said on live TV last week that “a source at the ranch” had told him Nordio had visited Minetti and Cipriani “in early March” the implication was clear: this was a perversion of the course of justice by the Meloni government.

A furious Nordio phoned in to deny the claim and accused the journalist of “touching rock bottom” “There’s a limit to everything,” he said, “Even to this moral and mediatic degradation.” Ranucci replied that it was only “a hypothesis” that he and his team were still checking.

A defiant Meloni told a press conference last week:

Certainly, if what emerges from the journalistic inquiry is true then something has been missed in the job that’s been done but this is not a job that the Ministry of Justice can do… the ministry does not have the tools to carry out investigations. The ministry relies on the Magistratura to do investigations and the Magistratura relies on the judicial police.

Francesca Nanni, the Procuratrice Generale of the Milan Court of Appeal, which carried out the judicial inquiry in the case, admitted that no checks had been done abroad. “We might admit in the end to not being perceptive, even if diligent,” she said.

As for Minetti, she issued a statement in which she denied that she had ever been the object of formal investigation of any kind in Uruguay. And she denied “categorically” the accusation that she had been involved in legal proceedings against the biological parents of “my son.”

She said the claims made by Il Fatto Quotidiano are “unfounded and gravely damaging to my reputation and that of my family” and she had instructed lawyers to sue the newspaper and any other journalists who write “false, defamatory and damaging” things about her and them.

In an interview with Il Corriere della Sera published on Monday, Cipriani likewise denied the newspaper’s accusations. Asked if they were false he replied: “All of them. Starting with the adoption which they define as illegal. We spent nearly four years respecting the procedure: judges, social workers, psychologists …Uruguay is not a banana republic it’s a serious place where things get done seriously.”

Asked why the adoption tribunal in Uruguay had ignored Minetti’s previous convictions when considering whether to let the couple adopt the boy, he said: “Go and ask the judges and the adoption agency INAU (Instituto del Niño y Adolescente del Uruguay). We told them everything about ourselves. They knew everything. Even if they only had to go on Google to find out.”

What of the claims that his ranch is used for bunga bunga style parties? “It’s a casa normalissima where I have received guests for 30 years,” he retorted. As for Epstein, in the end the pedophile did not lend him any money, he said, and ‘has never been my partner’.

This latest blow to Italy’s first female prime minister, who had seemed invulnerable until little over a month ago, comes hard on the heels of her decisive defeat in a referendum in March on her cherished plans to reform Italy’s sclerotic disgracefully slow, incompetent and politicized justice system. It also follows her bust-up in mid-April with Donald Trump, who called her a coward “who does not want to help get rid of a nuclear weaponed Iran.”

Miraculously, perhaps, Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party is riding more or less as high now in the polls as before these setbacks and still significantly higher than when it topped the ballot at the 2022 general election – which is almost unheard of for a party in power in a western democracy.

Nevertheless, if Silvio il Magnifico wants, as I am sure he must, Giorgia Meloni’s government to beat the record of 1,412 days in power then he really must hot foot it back to Heaven pronto.