Berlusconi is only human

The Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose recent affair with an 18-year-old model has wrecked his marriage but hardly had any effect whatsoever on the electorate's opinions of him, has commented on the fling and what newspapers claim are recordings of telephone conversations he had with prostitutes.

Berlusconi: "I am not a saint." Maybe Brown and co. could learn a thing or two?
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"There are tons of good-looking girls out there. I am not a saint," he says. The general consensus in Italy seems to be: "You old goat, you!"

Perhaps if our own politicians confessed to being merely human who are as open to temptation as the rest of us rather than believing that they ought to provide some sort of honourable and entirely unnecessary example to us common folk, we might not judge them quite so harshly when their failings are revealed to us. After all, how many of us can genuinely say that, were we in a position whereby we could have a second home and £400 a month to spend on food at the tax-payer's expense, we would not do the same? Personally, I'd have been bathing in Krug and feeding my cat Beluga (only he probably wouldn't eat it, since he seems to prefer fruitcake to the fishy foods typically enjoyed by the feline community).