ROME – Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced in a dramatic tweet Friday her relationship with longstanding partner Andrea Giambruno, whose flamboyant behaviour has been an increasing embarrassment to her, is “finished,” explaining that “our paths have divided for a long time, and the moment has come to recognize that.” Ms Meloni’s announcement came after a satirical television programme aired footage Thursday night on commercial Mediaset tv of Giambruno, a television journalist for the commercial Mediaset company, recorded saying that he was searching for candidates for “threesomes, even foursomes.”

 Ms Meloni, 46, in her social media post said that “my relationship with Andrea Giambruno, which has lasted almost 10 years, finishes here. I thank him for the splendid years that we spent together, for the difficulties we went through, and for having given me the most important thing in my life, our daughter Ginevra.”

 “I will defend what we were, I will defend our friendship and I will defend at all costs a child of seven years, who loves her mother and her father, as I was not able to love my (father). I have nothing else to say on this.” Meloni also added that “ ps may those people who hoped to weaken me by striking at my home life know that while a drop of water can hope to uproot a stone, the stone remains stone and the drop is only water:”

 The postscript in her post evidently referred to the recording of Giambruno, 42, aired on the satirical programme in which he curses people working with him on the television news show that he anchors.

 “Are you open? What’s your name?” he was recorded saying to a woman colleague, “do we know each other? Where have I seen you before? Was I drunk?”

 “What love? You know that I and (name not aired) have a pact? All of Mediaset knows it, now you also know, but we are looking for a third participant because we do threesomes, also the foursome … “

 Fatto Quotidiano newspaper quoted well-informed sources as saying that the revelations on the satirical programme “accelerated the shift in a situation that already had degenerated for months” between the couple.