I remember goggling at the footage of the two of them when covering some summit or other, Berlusconi bounding into the room and wrapping the startled Blair in a huge hug, with the words, "Ciao, Tonee!" But the best such anecdote is about the time the two of them were together and the Italian leader turned to Blair and said: "You know, Tony, I love you so much, if you were a woman, I would go down on my knee and propose to you," and he, hardly missing a beat, replied: "Silvio, if you were still as rich as you are now, I would say yes."

What a pair of charmers; it's no surprise that they've both convinced millions of people to let them do whatever they feel like. Tony's still jealous of the cash, mind.

Outside of Marrland, however, every journalist who has taken on the Italian election, I'm sad to report, is doomed to a lifetime in Newspaper Hades, where the walls are lined with Have I Got News For You cuttings-collages made up entirely of Daily Mail headlines, and where residents are woken every morning at 4 am by Richard Littlejohn reading 'The Sun Says', piped loudly through a network of loudspeakers as prevalent as CCTV cameras in Cardiff City centre. The daily agendas of back-breaking labour and lunch meetings with failed politicians are written by the Grauniad's sub-editors.

To avoid making people too ill, and giving too much time and space to the brain-rotting guff spread across the dead trees, I'll stick to the main culprit: The Times.

In an odd article which, in an embarrassingly crass manner, foolishly tries to work out what's going to happen in Italy over the next five years or so, Bronwen Maddox drops this little gem:

[Berlusconi's] move to scrap first-past-the-post voting, forced through parliament last year, did much to produce the tangled election result.

Firstly, it wasn't FPTP. It was AMS, a form of proportional representation. Secondly, the crazy new system did nothing to affect the amount of parties—even under FPTP, the two sides were massive coalitions—or much else outside of making the system more discriminatory against the centre Left. The 'tangled' 'chaos' was more to do with the fact that half the voters wanted the centre Right to win and half wanted the centre Left to win, which in turn was made more confusing by the fact that the choice was between a crook and a bore.

Elsewhere, Rosemary Righter at least notices that only 75 per cent of the seats used to be elected via FPTP, but that's as far as she gets before idiocy takes control of her fingers, guiding them across the keyboard in a malicious manner that demonstrates an utter lack of understanding and completely fails to show any reason why she should be paid to comment on such things, bar the creditable use of a nice piece of alliteration.

Berlusconi lost his shamefully cynical gamble that because the Prodi coalition includes so many tiny parties, the more cohesive (though barely more united) Centre Right could scrape back if he repealed the 1993 electoral reform establishing first-past-the-post voting for 75 per cent of seats, and returned to the deservedly discredited Italian habit of proportional representation.

This is what's known as a 'Blair' truth, i.e. something that is semantically correct, but whose unstated-though-intended implications simply aren't. This is a quaint label which actually cunningly describes itself, as it is more accurately a 'political truth', but nobody likes timelessness in politics, as it removes the base for wildly misplaced hope and pointless angry posturing.

Italy does have a history of poor proportional representation, which has been largely responsible for having a change of PM pretty much every year since Benito Mussolini was hung upside down from a Milanese lamppost. (It may also have been responsible for making Italy's economy one of the biggest in the world, but this is a debate for another place and another time.) However, by describing it simply as 'proportional representation', which is like describing football as a 'sport', and ascribing to it 'habit' status, which lumps it into a backward-sounding era, and failing to point out that a 75 per cent FPTP system is not FPTP, but another form of proportional representation, as mentioned above, Ms Righter is playing the role of Ms Wronger, and flagrantly tarring many innocent things with one ugly brush.

It's not all bad news for the Times' people, however. Richard Owen, who got a front-row pass to the proceedings, is currently merely in front of an interrogatory panel in purgatory. In an article which does an admirable job of explaining the old and the new system accurately and easily, which for a second looked like redeeming the execrable nonsense that appears elsewhere in the paper, he makes one little, but important error.

A referendum in 1993 gave Italy an electoral system in which three quarters of seats were allotted by a Westminster-style first-past-the-post system and a quarter by proportional representation. This was hailed at the time as a move towards stability and an end to fragile revolving-door coalitions. The Centre Left duly ruled for five years after Romano Prodi’s victory in 1996, and Signor Berlusconi ruled for another five years after winning in 2001.

That's only partly true. In October 1998, Romano Prodi (the then head of the Centre Left ruling coalition) lost a vote of confidence, and with it, the premiership. A new government was formed, which lasted until April 2000. The next government, headed by former PM Guiliano Amato, lasted for just over a year, before Silvio waltzed in. Silvio had a relatively untroubled time at the top (personal problems notwithstanding) because the Italian voters wanted to see if the daft-tongued demigod of Italian business could use his skills to make Italy, rather than just himself, rich. When it became clear he couldn't, they voted for the other guy.

The implication in the article (by only mentioning that it was 'hailed' as a cure for instability) hints, not at the actual state of play, which was built on the same two large coalitions as now, but that a switch from FPTP to PR meant loads of little parties sprung up and that is why there is all this 'chaos'. Given the minor nature of his crime, Mr Owen is expected to escape Hack Hell for the time being.

The people responsible for the headline, however, 'Left says voting system is to blame for Italian chaos', which has little bearing on most of the article, are on their way to play in the fiery red-hot sandpit with Piers Morgan and Rebekah Wade.

P.S. (doesn't really fit in elsewhere) The Wall Street Journal Europe:

The Wall Street Journal Europe has doubts about the stability of the upcoming government and accuses the "proportional lunacy". "A messy election in Italy ... will in the best case scenario end up installing a weak government lucky to last out the year. Score another one for Europe's weakness for the nutty system of proportional representation."

'The' nutty system of PR. Only one is there? And once again, where do Italy's voters come into this?