If soldi, sport e sesso — riches, sport and sex — were politically indispensable in Italy, the unlamented former Prime Minister Romano Prodi would never have won so much as a council seat.

But they are seldom a liability: not even the third “S”, which has turned political news columns in Italy into something more like soft-porn serial fiction.

The taped recording of (part of) what allegedly passed between a 40-something escort girl and Silvio Berlusconi returns the sex life of the Italian Prime Minister inconveniently to the spotlight after the G8 summit in L’Aquila.

The gun has more smoke in it than ammunition. Because they support the Prime Minister’s contention that, whether or not they had sex, he definitely did not pay money for the pleasure, the tapes are far less damaging than the lack of full and clear answers to the questions, buzzing since April, about his relationship to Noemi Letizia — and the apparent relevance of that relationship to his wife Veronica’s demand for a divorce.

The Prime Minister can hardly be said to be on a cliff edge when the most that the newspaper La Repubblica can point to by way of political impact is a two-point fall in his popularity rating, to just under 50 per cent.

The trouble is that whereas The New York Times denounces Mr Berlusconi as “an ageing Lothario”, many an Italian whispers sympathetically that, for a septuagenarian who has had prostate cancer surgery, he is not doing badly. Besides, Italians never did believe him to be an angel.

Little over a year ago Mr Berlusconi pulled off an extraordinary political triumph, returning for his third term with a new party, the People of Liberty. He won against a centre-left united as it had never been before, simultaneously depositing Italy's old communist titans in the dustbin of history.

Neither advancing age nor bouts of ill health had dented his hold on the Italian imagination — any more than the lawsuits on charges ranging from false accounting and tax fraud to bribery and alleged mafia connections, or longstanding objections to potential conflicts of interest in office or, even, the charge that he is in politics primarily to protect his person and business empire from undue curiosity.

The votes of at least half of his countrymen (and many more than half of Italy’s women voters and practising Roman Catholics) have enabled Mr Berlusconi plausibly to argue that “Italians like me the way I am”.

His secrets are simple. First, he is a born salesman, endowed with limitless self-confidence, and the product he sells is optimism in a nation hungry for that commodity.

His second great strength is that, in a country where only 20 per cent of voters say that they have any trust in politicians, he is an “anti-politician” politician, blunt, funny, a great communicator — and hyperactive.

Third, he is lucky in his enemy: the centre-left Democratic Party is in disarray even greater, if that is possible, than the Tories after 1997. In Italy the Great Communicator seems (not least courtesy of his media empire) to be everywhere; and his opponents nowhere.

To his supporters he still embodies decisive leadership; and most of those who not only oppose his politics but cringe at his antics put more faith in the arrival of the Grim Reaper than they do in his political defeat.

Compared with the past scandals that Mr Berlusconi has survived, the third “S” is thus unlikely to put the Seventh Seal of death on his career — unless the cumulative impact is to reveal a man who can no longer control himself, as his wife has hinted.

It is not impossible that Italians could eventually turn on him in a fit of morality but they would have to be convinced that he had lost the plot, not just the belt of his trousers.

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