Our Race To The Bottom: It's All In Black & White (Now Offer To Take Your Girl To Italy)

We're not saying you shouldn't respect politicians or women, but, at some point, you have to admit it gets to be difficult:

The Italian prime minister says he has nothing to be ashamed of, and that he has just been having fun. But the sheer mass of sordid details of his “bunga bunga” parties has now been revealed for the first time. The descriptions provided by prosecutors, investigating allegations of wrongdoing, prostitution and sex with an under age dancer, read like a bacchanalia.

One opposition politician has already remarked this week: “Compared with Berlusconi, Caligula was a prude.” And so it might seem from the 389 pages of investigation and full gallery of skimpily-dressed showgirls named in prosecutors’ papers and assembled for the first time by The Daily Telegraph.

“After the meal,” a woman on one of hundreds of surveillance tapes says, “I heard some girls saying 'Let’s go down to the bunga bunga (room)’, a sort of disco with sofas, a dance pole, a kind of bar and bathrooms where the girls changed into revealing outfits.” Half-naked starlets are then said to have performed pole dances, put on stripteases and “wriggled up to the prime minister provocatively on the sofa, rubbing him up and letting him have a feel, indulging in mock lesbian kisses and rubbing against each other”. Another woman is said to be wandering around topless, repeatedly kissing Mr Berlusconi.

One showgirl was ordered to dress up for the 74-year-old prime minister as a nurse. “You’ll have to get a white coat, with nothing on underneath of course,” she was told. “Put on a stethoscope, a nurse’s uniform and white stay-up stockings. You know how much he likes that sort of thing, playing the patient.”

The women were described unflatteringly by one witness as “a bunch of idiots who dance like mongols”.

The frenzied organising of the prime minister’s courtiers is revealed too, putting together gatherings in Milan, Rome, and on Lake Maggiore. A faithful lieutenant is taped saying: “He’s on form and raring to go. He’s just called me and he is on top form. This is the right evening but who can I find?”

A scramble ensues, and women compete to be at the parties because Mr Berlusconi is viewed, according to one newspaper, as a “cash machine for which you need no PIN”.

All we have to add is, the next time you hear of a rapper describing women as a bunch of "hos", you be sure to tell them why they're wrong, O.K.?

Between examples like this - and the way "no-fault" divorce works - we're 100% positive every word-slinger out there will believe you,...