At ten minutes past four on the afternoon of 28 April 1945, a plumber by the name of Moretti shot and killed a prematurely aged man and a youngish woman, who was not wearing any underwear, in front of the Villa Belmonte, near Lake Como. Next to Moretti, who was later tried for theft and other misdeeds, was one Colonel Valerio, whose submachine-gun had jammed while trying to shoot the defenceless couple.
Millions of words have been written about the last moments of Benito Mussolini and Clara Petacci, but until now not a single writer — not even the definitive biographer of the Duce, Nicholas Farrell — has managed to discover correctly Benito’s last words to Clara just before he was cut down by the cowardly communist assassin. This is a Spectator exclusive, Mussolini’s very last words — alas, words that I am not at liberty to reveal how I came to discover. (A hint. The Churchill family.) Here they are verbatim but translated by me: ‘What shit (merda) this Honours Forfeiture Committee is. Can you imagine, the shitty (merda) British have stripped me of my knighthood.’
As everyone knows, Valerio left the corpses of the assassinated couple lying on the road, to be later transported to Piazzale Loreto, in Milan, to be hanged upside-down from the girders of the roof above a petrol station. The cheering mob even had the courtesy to tie a rope to la Petacci’s skirt to hide her nakedness. But no one until now has ever managed to find out what the Duce was so depressed about on that horribly rainy day when he was shot like a mad dog. The forfeiture of his knighthood by faceless British mandarins had haunted him throughout the war and left him a broken man.
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