Already reeling from an embarrassing divorce battle that threatens to destroy his political authority, Silvio Berlusconi came under attack yesterday from the Vatican as another close ally appeared ready to break ranks.

In a stunning denunciation of the Italian Prime Minister’s private life, Cardinal Walter Kasper, the head of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and a confidant of the Pope, said that “everybody, but above all a head of government” should behave with “seriousness and sobriety” and not indulge in “excesses”.

In the first comments by a senior Vatican official, which are likely to have received Pope Benedict XVI’s tacit approval, Cardinal Kasper criticised the Berlusconis for setting a bad example. “A greater attention to privacy would have been more fitting for both spouses,” he told the newspaper La Stampa, especially since Mr Berlusconi was seen as “an example of success by millions of men and women”.

The 72-year-old Prime Minister and his wife Veronica Lario have been entertaining Italians with their public spat over Mr Berlusconi’s alleged fondness for starlets. He has described his wife’s insinuations, particularly those questioning his relationship with an 18-year-old Naples woman, as lies conjured up by his political opponents on the Left.

Italian commentators have noted, however, that the attack on his penchant for showgirls had initially come not from the Left, but from his ally Gianfranco Fini, the Speaker of the Lower House and co-leader in the ruling People of Liberty party.

Mr Fini seems to have every intention of exploiting the Prime Minister’s discomfort. Yesterday he oozed gravitas as he presided over a ceremony in L’Aquila honouring the victims of the earthquake, looking and sounding every inch the “sober and responsible” national statesman the Church says Italy deserves. It is an open secret in Rome that Mr Fini hopes to succeed Mr Berlusconi as Prime Minister, completing his journey from former neo-Fascist youth leader to respectability.At L’Aquila he unveiled a plaque, stood with bowed head at the university hostel where eight students died, and hailed a baby born four days after the earthquake as a “symbol of hope”. L’Aquila was “the capital of Italian sorrow” but also of “Italian strength”, Mr Fini declared.

During the tour, he took the opportunity to contradict the Prime Minister, praising magistrates for investigating shoddy construction to bring to justice those responsible for deaths and injuries in the earthquake. Mr Berlusconi had said that such inquiries should be put on the back burner.

It is not the first time the leader has sought to distance himself from the Prime Minister. Students of Machiavelli point out that criticism of Mr Berlusconi’s policy of fielding young women from showbusiness in the European elections first surfaced on the website of Fondazione Farefuturo, Mr Fini’s think-tank.

That attack came from Sofia Ventura, a lecturer in political science, who denounced “co-opting young girls, sometimes very young girls, of undoubted good looks but with a background in which it is hard to discern any justification for their presence in an elected assembly”.

Observers say that with Mr Berlusconi distracted by the divorce, Mr Fini’s moment to seize leadership of the Right has come. “There are two people who now ought to leave Berlusconi and go their own way: Veronica Lario and Gianfranco Fini,” said Giampaolo Pansa, a political commentator.

“Fini has not ceased to conduct guerrilla warfare against Berlusconi”.

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