Grand political comedy in Rome and the Vatican | 2 May 2013

I’m just back from a week in Italy where a grand political comedy playing in Rome has at least been some compensation for the poor weather and the general economic gloom. Giorgio Napolitano, the 87-year-old former communist who had been looking forward to retiring after his seven-year stint as President of the Republic, was not only denied a farewell visit from the Queen of England because of her tummy bug, but was denied retirement as well. With the parliament, which elects the president, unable to agree on a successor, its members insisted that he continue in office for an unprecedented second term which, if he sees it out, will make him 94 when he is finally allowed to step down.

At his second swearing-in ceremony in parliament, Napolitano made plain his anger and contempt for the politicians who had spent the two months since an inconclusive general election squabbling among themselves instead of forming the government that Italy desperately needed if it was to avoid catastrophe. He called the political parties ‘ineffectual’ and ‘self-indulgent’; he said they were guilty of ‘unforgivable’ procrastinations and mistakes; he told them they had let the country down in its darkest hour. And the ruder he was to them, the more they clapped and the louder they cheered in a bizarre display of masochism.

It’s the president’s job after an election to invite a politician to try to form a government, and Napolitano surprised everyone by choosing a man young enough to be his grandson, Enrico Letta, who at 46 is the same age as David Cameron. In Italy old men usually hold the power, so the Italian press has made much of Letta’s relative youth, of his being a child of the 1980s, a fan of Dire Straits and U2, and a still keen player of table-top football.