Italian politics explained

Couldn't let this description of Silvio Berlusconi's government disappear into the ether:

...it's like Thatcher (but a Thatcher who hangs out with the mafia who also privately owns the BBC and Manchester United) governing in coalition with the BNP and a pack of paramilitary loons who want to run an independent state based on Thomas Hardy`s Wessex.

It's a laugh a minute down in Rome; Berlusconi's planned biopic will presumably be a knockabout farce of some sort, Danny de Vito as Berlusconi and Arnold Schwarznegger as Gianfranco Fini, spinning about on the spot and knocking each other over with the fasces, etc. Hillarious.