ITALY:Silvio Berlusconi is not a man who gives in easily. He has yet to concede that he lost the last Italian general election - and that was 10 months ago. So his wife, Veronica Lario, knew it was going to take an extraordinary manoeuvre to drag words of contrition out of him after he was overheard propositioning a couple of showgirls at a gala dinner.
Following a TV award ceremony hosted by his Mediaset group on Friday, Mr Berlusconi was chatting to the Venezuelan-born dancer Aida Yespica, a former Miss Amazonia. "I'd go with you anywhere," he was reported to have told her.
The former prime minister's roving eye then settled on Mara Carfagna, a one-time winner of the Miss Smiles and Songs title, who has since appeared in numerous variety shows on Mr Berlusconi's TV channels and entered parliament at the last election as an MP for his Forza Italia! party. She is now a member of the Italian parliament's constitutional affairs committee.
Standing beside her, the billionaire politician declared to guests: "Take a look at her! I'd marry her if I weren't married already." Unfortunately for Mr Berlusconi, his declarations made their way on to the front page of a national newspaper.
But even then, Ms Lario was unable to coax an apology out of her husband of 17 years. So she took the nuclear option: she went public with her pain and indignation in a letter of her own, again splashed across the front of a newspaper. In a tone of acid restraint that suggested she had learned a thing or two from her husband on how to handle the media, the former actress and mother of three of Mr Berlusconi's five children said his remarks were "unacceptable" and "damaging to my dignity".
She explained that she had failed to convince her husband in private to recognise that his behaviour had been beyond the pale. "I am therefore asking for a public apology," she added.
Her extraordinary initiative prompted speculation that Mr Berlusconi's marriage was doomed. It also shone a painfully bright spotlight on the 70-year-old opposition leader's attempts to convince Italy's voters that he is still young enough to be prime minister again. Having had a face lift and a hair transplant, Mr Berlusconi has tried to give the impression of a man in his prime.
Ms Lario said her husband's comments could not be dismissed as jokey remarks. Hinting at how deeply they had hurt her, she said she felt like a woman in one of the novels of the Irish writer Catherine Dunne. "I ask if, like the Catherine Dunne character, I have to regard myself as 'half of nothing'," she wrote.
Piling insult on injury, the vehicle she chose to deliver her public admonishment was a centre-left newspaper that had long been fiercely critical of her husband. Last night, her tactics produced the desired response. Mr Berlusconi proffered an excruciatingly public act of contrition. "Excuse me, I beg you," he wrote in a letter again released to the media. He lauded his partner as "the splendid person you are and have always been for me since the day we met and fell in love".