End of the alpha papa

Not Alan Partridge's big-screen moment but someone far more sinister who was more mafioso than prime minister - it's bye-bye Berlusconi.  Italy's highest court has upheld the verdict on tax evasion - appropriately what brought down Al Capone.  Ol' Silvio inflated acquisition costs for broadcast rights at his television company in 2002 and 2003 as part of a complicated tax scam and now, after 17 major trials in the last 20 years, justice has finally caught up with him and this will hurt more than the replica of Milan Cathedral that was thrown at his face a few years ago.
As he finds the prospect of community service - or 're-education' as he puts it - repugnant, he'll probably opt for house arrest.  Unlike Jeffrey Archer, who for a while was housed in one of Britain's harshest prisons, Berlusconi won't see the inside of a cell due to his advanced years (yet still capable of running a major political party, hmm).  But like General Augusto Pinochet, who also suffered the indignity of house arrest (albeit in England), this is a judgement from which he cannot come back.  Just before Pinochet died, he was convicted of massive corruption during his tenure as dictator, destroying his reputation for probity and wiping out his last bastion of middle-class support.  The Chilean did not go to prison but he died in disgrace.
Berlusconi surely has to bow out of politics now to avoid tarnishing his party (though he created it as his personal vehicle to power) and when that happens, hopefully Italian politicians can unpick the damage wrought to the justice system by this modern-day Machiavelli.  Even his prison sentence here has been reduced from four years to one because of a law he introduced in 2006, cutting three years off any conviction for a crime committed before that date.  There was also the changing of laws on fraudulent accounting to escape prosecution and the introduction of a statute of limitations where if a trial dragged on for too long (for the wheels of Italian justice grind slowly) it was thrown out once it reached its time limit, something endless appeals could achieve (in contrast to the Russia of his friend Vladimir Putin, where a dead man, Sergei Magnitsky, has been convicted).  The only reason this trial succeeded was because his customary appeal was placed at the head of the queue for appeals to ensure he got his just desserts.
It has been mentioned that his daughter Marina will take over his political mantle.  Do the similarities with Marine La Pen taking over from her far-right father in France extend beyond the similarity of the name?  Meanwhile, Berlusconi, who rose from a cruise ship singer to Italy's richest man through more than shady dealings, can focus on his appeals against abuse of office and paying an underage prostitute (carrying a seven-year jail sentence and a lifetime ban from politics) and obtaining and publishing a police wiretap that damaged the reputation of a political opponent (a one-year sentence).  He is also under suspicion for bribing a former senator to switch sides and join his political party.  He will not die in office like Robert Mugabe and must look enviously at the reigns of his chums Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan stretching off into the distance.  Even a commiserating telephone call from Tony Blair will not salve Berlusconi's woes.