For nearly two decades Carla Powell was among the most forceful political hostesses in London. The fiery wife of Charles Powell, one of Margaret Thatcher’s inner circle, she was a networker with more connections than Google, accumulating the great and the good the way others collect Meissen china.

When Powell returned to her native Italy four years ago, contemplating a quiet retirement with her husband at a villa 25 miles from Rome, she rejoiced that she had put all the “bitchery of London” behind her.

She could not have been more wrong. Her arrival sparked a feud that flared into open hostilities last week between herself and the local mayor.

“This is war,” she declared yesterday. “I am down in the trenches and I haven’t slept for three nights. I don’t care if they kill me.”

This, remember, is a woman renowned for the passion of her vendettas, sometimes spending hours on the telephone denouncing her victims. She is also renowned for the eminence of her contacts.

Heads of state take her calls. Once, famously, her husband tried to interrupt her telephone conversation, pleading with her to get off the phone in case Thatcher wanted to speak to him. She replied sweetly: “But Charles, darling, this is the prime minister.”

The issue that has sent her to war now — mobilising her powerful contacts as she does so — is water. The Powells’ drama has uncanny echoes of the film Jean de Florette, in which villagers gloat at the back-breaking efforts of a rich outsider to carry water to his dying crops.

Last week Lord Powell, the quintessential English public servant, found himself cast in the humiliating role portrayed by Gérard Depardieu in the movie.

He was forced to make return trips by tractor to fill plastic containers with fresh water from a public fountain three miles away.

“Charles has spent all week going backwards and forwards filling our tanks,” his wife said. “Everybody is on holiday and the man who helps us has broken his foot. It’s considered shameful that people in Uganda have to queue for water. Here, 25 miles from Rome, we have to do the same.”

The Powells have two wells on their eight-acre estate but the water table is cursed with sulphur and hot springs. The Romans loved this area: the ancient spa at Cretone, three miles away, still provides mud baths and holistic massages — an attraction pointed out to Cherie Blair, the prime minister’s wife, when she stayed with the Powells last year. But the sulphur makes the well water smell of rotten eggs.

They pump water from a river but this, too, is sulphurous — and muddy. “I’ve had to replace the water treatment plant twice and now the pumps don’t work,” Powell said. “Last month two of my grandchildren were intoxicated by the water. The computers that regulate the chemicals in the water keep going wrong, so there was probably too much chlorine. My eight-month-old granddaughter came out in a terrible rash.”

Her son, a businessman in Hong Kong, took his children away. “I thought that was the last straw,” she said.

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