“The album will be in the shops on Tuesday,” Mr Apicella told The Daily Telegraph yesterday. “Berlusconi wrote all the words and I put them to music.” The songs, inspired by traditional Neapolitan music as well as samba, tell of unrequited love and the longing for a lover.

“I run my hands down your side, because it’s you. I adore you and I already miss you,” is a line from one of the songs.

In another, the 75-year-old ex-prime minister, whose final term in office was marked by a string of sex scandals, laments “another day of wind and rain, another night without you”. In a song entitled Stay With Me, he wrote “surround me with love, stay with me and leave me your heart”.