It’s been a while since Silvio Berlusconi has made the papers for sending his underlings to purloin the knickers of one of his dalliances. Even if he’d been caught red handed this morning it would not have made the news. Journalists in Italy have been on strike today. They are protesting against another of those laws that their prime minister keeps passing to prevent himself and his cronies going to prison. In this case they are not allowed to use the wire tapped conversations which are one of the principal ways investigative reporters in the country expose political corruption. A wholly unexpected side-effect is that investigations against the Mafia will become that much harder.

He’s managed to get away with being a buffoon for his whole period in office but his plans for cuts of €25bn (£21bn) seem to be helping the scales fall from the eyes of the 50% of Italians who don’t already loathe him.

Measures include the usual pay freezes, not replacing civil servants and pushing back the retirement age.

His political fronts have always been coalitions of some of the most unpleasant and corrupt sections of Italian society but even members of his own Popolo della Libertà (PdL)are reacting badly to his proposals. They’ve tabled not 1, not 2 but 1200 amendments to his budget which is currently in front of the Italian parliament. Given the sort of people who would consider it reasonable to be associated with Berlusconi it’s a safe bet that high principle is taking second place to campanilismo.

Berlusconi has responded with his trademark lack of melodrama telling one of his execrable TV channels “If parliament does not approve this budget, then we will go home”. Very few people in Europe would consider the promise of his resignation a scary threat.

It may just be that this time there is a credible opposition to Berlusconi inside his own organisation, the deeply unlovely neo-fascist Gianfranco Fini. The word is that he is looking to split the PdL and merge with the Christian Democrats to create a new party. The one thing you can say with certainty about it is that it will have a lot of Mafia clients and Mussolini fans. However it shows that even electorally viable coalitions can fracture under the pressure of events and competing economic strategies.