Girlies and blokes are never going to agree about divorce law, and the increasingly ludicrous awards made to the scorned lady. But yesterday’s judgement in the Silvio/Veronica Berlusconi case will probably baffle more folks than most.

An Italian court awarded Veronica maintenance of €36m a year, the judge opining that Ms Lario was “entitled to live in the manner she was accustomed to”. There is of course something of a philosophical flaw in this argument, in that its presupposition is that Signora Berlusconi married Bunga-bunga man purely for the money. While this may well be true, it doesn’t exactly give out the right kind of message when it comes to what young ladies should be looking for in a partner….and it gives out an inflammatory message to ordinary Italians in the current economic climate.

Before you all get started on me, let me say that Silvio Berlusconi humiliated his wife, is an uncouth jerk of the first order, and if the Court had ordered him to bring her breakfast in bed for the rest of his unnatural life dressed in sackcloth, ashes and a very silly hat, I’d have regarded it as a light sentence. What I’m balking at here is thirty six million euros a f**king year.

I realise that parallels can be tedious, but that’s getting on for €95,000 a day. If Veronica Lario needs ninety-five grand a day to live on, then it could well be that 30 million Italians could give her some advice about how to cut back a little. In the meantime, we all need to wake up to the increasingly obvious fact that nobody anywhere is entitled to live in a manner to which they’ve become accustomed. If that was the case, I’d be entitled to sue the Fed, the ECB, the Bank of England, the Treasury, Scottish Widows and the first ‘broker’ I worked with, for three times my current income per year. The 90% of poor unfortunates in worse straits than me might resort to ex-lex solutions involving wiring, chairs, rope, lampposts, sharp edges and so forth. That would be entirely a matter for them.

We do need to get real about divorce law. At the minute, it works primarily for lawyers, usually for wives, and very occasionally for the kids involved, if any. In my life to date, I have seen it work unfairly in the bloke’s favour on just the one (1) occasion. Given that over 95% of the wandering, bullying, smelly feet problems clearly implicate blokes, I accept that the bias should indeed be in favour of wives and children. But I object to the sense of entitlement in all this, and bitterly resent how much the legal-eagles make out of it.

The basic thing that’s wrong is making everything financial, basing it on the total of joint wealth, and making it adversarial in legal terms. This is not the calm, blindfolded law we have been brought up to expect: it is spite and anger delivered through the medium of amubulance chasers – who get paid more and more the longer it goes on. ‘No-fault’ divorce favours only lawyers (who can get their turnover up for less work) and opportunists.

So there we are. That should make for an explosive comment-thread.