The first thing you need to know is that the sentence is final: Silvio Berlusconi is guilty of tax evasion and has been sentenced to four years imprisonment with no further chance of appeal. He is also to be banned from holding public office for a period of time yet to be established.

If it were made into a film or a play, it would have to begin near the end: from the parties that were held in the weeks and days before the trial, when the girls tried to grab the last of the money and favours whilst talking privately about him with open, at times ferocious disrespect, calling him a ‘flaccid arse’ and other things. ‘He’ was at this time the Prime Minister of what is still formally regarded as the world’s seventh largest industrial power.