At ten minutes past four on the afternoon of 28 April 1945, a plumber by the name of Moretti shot and killed a prematurely aged man and a youngish woman, who was not wearing any underwear, in front of the Villa Belmonte, near Lake Como. Next to Moretti, who was later tried for theft and other misdeeds, was one Colonel Valerio, whose submachine-gun had jammed while trying to shoot the defenceless couple.
Millions of words have been written about the last moments of Benito Mussolini and Clara Petacci, but until now not a single writer — not even the definitive biographer of the Duce, Nicholas Farrell — has managed to discover correctly Benito’s last words to Clara just before he was cut down by the cowardly communist assassin. This is a Spectator exclusive, Mussolini’s very last words — alas, words that I am not at liberty to reveal how I came to discover. (A hint. The Churchill family.) Here they are verbatim but translated by me: ‘What shit (merda) this Honours Forfeiture Committee is. Can you imagine, the shitty (merda) British have stripped me of my knighthood.’
As everyone knows, Valerio left the corpses of the assassinated couple lying on the road, to be later transported to Piazzale Loreto, in Milan, to be hanged upside-down from the girders of the roof above a petrol station. The cheering mob even had the courtesy to tie a rope to la Petacci’s skirt to hide her nakedness. But no one until now has ever managed to find out what the Duce was so depressed about on that horribly rainy day when he was shot like a mad dog. The forfeiture of his knighthood by faceless British mandarins had haunted him throughout the war and left him a broken man. Well, now we know. Musso’s knighthood had been awarded to him in 1923 and rescinded in 1940. The Duce stayed angry and depressed thinking about it day and night, which at times made him impotent. I hate to think what that poor Fred the Shred is going through.
As irony would have it, exactly the same thing happened to Nicolae Ceausescu on his last night on earth. Ceausescu had his knighthood revoked by the faceless British committee the night before his execution by firing squad in 1989. The Romanian dictator wanted to have one last you-know-what with his wife — who was also shot in the brave tradition of Romania and Italy — but both were too upset over the loss of the British honour to perform, no matter how hard they tried. Their guards were visibly embarrassed. The impotent strongman was still trying when they were dragged out and shot at dawn.
Anthony Blunt’s case was even more horrible. He never once managed to have sex with rent boys once Lady Thatcher lifted his knighthood for being a Russian spy. He continued to pay but was unable to perform. Good Russian money thrown away. A world-famous psychiatrist I spoke to, Professor Wulfshlagger of Berne University, explained to me that wielding the axe where knighthoods are concerned is like chopping off a man’s penis in most cases. ‘The beta amyloid plaques of the brain interconnect with the decision to strip a man of his knighthood as if his manhood was being chopped off,’ said the learned prof. He went on to tell me that, when Robert Mugabe’s knighthood was revoked, the Zimbabwean monster became impotent overnight.
Professor Wulfshlagger was only indiscreet in the name of science. He had been flown to Salisbury, or whatever name that once beautiful city is now called by the clowns that run it, in a special jet sent by a desperate Mugabe. In Africa not being able to get it up is considered more shameful than not running away in the face of the enemy is thought of in Italy. ‘But there was little I could do for him,’ said the professor. ‘Since 2008, when the British decided to strip him of his knighthood, his sexual drive has left him completely and for ever. It was as if he had been emasculated with a scalpel, a rare medical phenomenon known as knighttration. It’s all in the mind, of course.’
Professor Wulfschlagger told me that Mussolini’s advertising his womanising after the outbreak of the war in 1940 was typical of those suffering from knighttration. Mussolini, Mugabe, Ceausescu, Blunt, none of them ever got it up again after they lost their knighthood. Sure, said the good prof, they pretended, but no one ever has sex again once afflicted by that rare phenomenon. Hitler, on the other hand, did have it off with Eva Braun twice before committing suicide. But the Führer was never given a knighthood, not even by the Duke of Windsor. So he had not a worry in the world on the night of 29 April 1945, a night of incredible lust on both their parts, Eva’s cries thankfully drowned out by the heavy bombing of the bunker by the unromantic Russkies.
Anyway, enough of sex, or the lack of it, once a knighthood has been stripped. The best way to keep a healthy sex life is never to accept an honour from the likes of Labour, but do accept a peerage any time. Peerages are for ever, like sex.
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