WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE MY BUNGA-BUNGA ROOM?

NO JOURNALIST has ever been granted access to the inner sanctum where Berlusconi allegedly held his debauched Bunga-Bunga parties . . . until now. Here, his biographer ALAN FRIEDMAN describes what happened when he was invited in.

AS SILVIO Berlusconi shows me round San Martino, his lavish 70-room 18thcentury villa on a country estate outside Milan, I can’t help wondering . . . which is the room where the parties took place, the supposedly wild nights that made a mockery of Italy and humiliated Berlusconi? As if sensing

what I am thinking, he asks with a devilish smile: ‘Would you like to see the famous Bunga-Bunga room? Do you have the courage? Do you dare?’

He spits out ‘Boong-gah! Boong-gah!’ in a voice as deep as Louis Armstrong, with a hint of erotic mischief.

He grins like a naughty teenage schoolboy as, sitting in a room surrounded by photographs of his family (and a Canaletto on the wall), he opens up about those parties and the accusations that he paid to have sex with a minor — the beautiful Moroccan nightclub belly dancer known to the whole world as Ruby the Heart Stealer.

‘Follow me,’ he says and leads me to a white door, which he throws opens with a flourish and fumbles for the light switch.

A thousand watts shines up the frescoed ceiling of what is an elaborate banquet room, a king’s dining hall, at least 60ft long.

Suddenly, Berlusconi is no longer timid or cautious, carefully advised by his army of lawyers to say nothing. He has become a matador, a one-man show of energy and humour as he strides proudly into the magnificent chamber.

‘This is where the soirees took place,’ he explains with a big smile.

This was the famous Bunga-Bunga room? Much to my disappointment, it is not a boudoir but a supersized dining room adorned with classic paintings and walls of mirrors and frescoes. The table is set with 36 places, as if for a state dinner.

He tells me: ‘Nothing has changed. The table is set just as elegantly as it was then. And I continue to this very day to have parties right here, in this room, and with different types of guests.’

But what about the first time Ruby was here, I ask. ‘On that occasion there were a significant number of beautiful girls from the worlds of TV and cinema,’ he replies.

There was no sex, only dinners with music? Even though the voluptuous Ruby returned here for nearly a dozen visits?

Berlusconi looks momentarily defensive and then flashes that big Hollywood smile of his.

‘I might add,’ he deadpans with an air of injured pride, ‘that even if there had been sex, here in a private house, it would not have been a crime. So where is the crime? What crime occurred here?’

He has always maintained he was unaware that Ruby was under 18, the age of consent for a prostitute in Italy.

‘She used to tell everybody she was 24 and she certainly looked that age, because she was intelligent and smart, and because she had lived a hard life.

‘But there was no possibility of there having been sex.’ No sex? ‘ Look here!’ He is suddenly indignant, even defiant. ‘I have always said that I never touched Ruby, not even with one finger, and Ruby has always said the same thing, and nobody saw anything.

‘So to prove there had been sex you would need a photograph or a video or a credible witness. But there is nothing of the sort. It is pure invention.’