The press will miss him: despite being almost universally critical, they know that other politicians can never be as colourful. You cannot imagine Chancellor Merkel holding a bunga bunga party, or David Cameron bluffing an underage prostitute out of jail by saying she was the granddaughter of the President of Egypt. Mario Monti, if he is the chosen successor, will never practice the rabbit-out-of-the-hat politics which caused a world summit to be convened in the rubble of l'Aquila and nearly built the Messina bridge.
As things get more difficult in Italy, and they will, the Italians are going to find him a very useful scapegoat. They may forget that it was not Berlusconi who piled the debt up to unmanageable levels: that was done long before, and it seemed, for a while, that Italy could manage them. And the people will find it useful to forget that whilst they publicly crave stability, before Berlusconi Italy had averaged more than one government a year since the war. They may forget, while shouting 'mafioso' as he went to see the President, that under his government there was more success against organised crime than ever before. And they may forget that, unlike his predecessors, he did not have his hand in the till. Silvio didn't want money, he wanted protection from his accusers and he wanted to be loved.
A statesman would have seen what was coming (how many did?) and warned his people that it was the end of the line for the way of life they had espoused, that tough measures would have to be taken to get them through the troubled waters ahead but that his steady hand on the tiller would guide them to safety.
But Silvio wasn't a statesman: he was an actor who stumbled, grinning, on to the world stage and had not learned his lines.
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