Enduring Silvio Berlusconi’s behaviour last week was like “sitting through a film you’ve seen before”, said Senator Anna Finocchiaro, the parliamentary head of Italy’s Democratic party. Not two months after starting his third stint as prime minister, Mr Berlusconi is in a familiar controversy.

The Senate is finishing work on a package of security laws on which Mr Berlusconi campaigned. An amendment added by his supporters and passed on Wednesday would suspend trials for all but the most serious crimes that took place before mid-2002. This will help focus the state’s limited resources on a wave of violent crime that has alarmed the public. But that is not all it will do. It will also halt a trial in Milan that aims to discover whether Mr Berlusconi paid €387,000 ($601,000, £306,000) to his lawyer David Mills, the estranged husband of Tessa Jowell, UK Olympics minister, to give false testimony in a court case a decade ago. (Both men deny wrongdoing.)