Benito Mussolini

At ten minutes past four on the afternoon of April 28, 1945, a plumber named 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 he was trying to shoot the defenseless couple.

Millions of words have been written about Benito Mussolini and Clara Petacci’s last moments, but until now not a single writer—not even Il Duce’s definitive biographer, Nicholas Farrell—had managed to correctly discover Benito’s last words to Clara before the cowardly communist assassin cut him down.

This is a Taki’s Mag exclusive: Mussolini’s very last words. Alas, I am not at liberty to reveal their source (hint: the Churchill family). Here they are verbatim, translated by me:

What shit (merda) this Honours Forfeiture Committee is! Can you imagine the shitty (merdoso) British have stripped me of my knighthood?

As everyone knows, Valerio left the assassinated couple’s corpses lying on the road, later to be dragged to Piazzale Loreto in Milan and hanged upside down from a petrol station’s roof girders. 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 ever managed to find out what Il Duce was so depressed about on that horribly rainy day when he was shot like a mad dog. Well, now you know.

Musso’s knighthood had been awarded to him in 1923 and rescinded in 1940. After faceless British mandarins forfeited it, he was left a haunted and broken man. Il Duce stayed angry and depressed thinking about it day and night, which at times made him impotent.

Exactly the same thing happened to Nicolae Ceausescu during his last night on Earth. The faceless British committee revoked Ceausescu’s knighthood the night before his 1989 execution by firing squad. The Romanian dictator wanted to have one last you-know-what with his wife, who was also scheduled to be shot in the brave Italo-Romanian tradition. But both were too upset over the loss of the British honor to perform, no matter how hard—I mean, soft—they tried. Their guards were visibly embarrassed. The impotent strongman was still giving it a go when they were dragged out and shot at dawn.

Anthony Blunt’s case was even more horrible. He never managed to have sex with rent boys after the Queen lifted his knighthood for being a Russian spy. He continued to pay but was unable to perform. That’s the worst of both worlds.