AS a political apprentice I once spent six months working for the Christian Democratic Party in Italy, where it had been in power ever since the end of the Second World War. This secondment came under the auspices of the Aldo Moro Foundation, set up in memory of the leader kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades in 1978. The foundation took for one of its purposes the strengthening of links with other European parties of like mind, among which for some reason it included the Scottish Conservative Party.

That was how I got chosen to go and spend my six months in a small town of the Veneto, the stretch of country that used to belong to the Republic of Venice on the landward side of its lagoon. The Italian deputato I was attached to, though only at the behest of his bosses, liked the arrangement not one bit: he apparently believed I was some sort of Euro-spy. I made attempts at conversation. Once in the car I asked him to explain to me a bitter internal dispute that was going on locally: ‘I see this group is on the left, and that group is on the right, but what does this lot in the middle stand for?’ “Sono putane”, he said, “they are whores”. That was that: the rest of the journey passed in silence. We were on our way, I recall, to a conference in a monastery on Catholic social philosophy. There he waxed eloquent to a sublime degree in a presentation of such daunting abstraction that I am sure only the Holy Ghost could have understood it, certainly not a poor Protestant boy like myself. He visibly disapproved when I declined to go to mass with him and his wife. I don’t think he could ever get his head round Protestantism – it was just unorthodox, and that was all he needed to know about it.

In the course of the six months I learned that all Christian Democrat politicians behaved like him. Not till some years later did I discover what I supposed to be the underlying reason for the tight-lipped suspicion in small things and in great. The power structure of the ruling party began to collapse under the weight of its own corruption in the early 1990s. In particular it emerged that my deputato, who was in the government by this time, had been bribed to use his influence in the award of a contract for a new stretch of autostrada from Brescia to Padua. He resigned from Parliament and abandoned his political career in return for immunity from prosecution.

That was the way the Italian system used to work when I knew it. Despite the dwindling and disappearance of the parties that existed then, from Catholics to Communists, I doubt if it has improved much since. Certainly the nine years’ supremacy meanwhile of Silvio Berlusconi, with his bimbos and implants, would have muddied the waters further rather than cleared them. He, too, had to leave office before the scandals could come out, so immense is the power of incumbency in Italy.

The incumbency may be powerful but it is also usually quite short, Berlusconi having been an exception to this rule. Now we see the latest ex-incumbent, Matteo Renzi, resigning after less than three years as prime minister when he lost a referendum on constitutional reform. Needless to say, he is already plotting to unseat his successor and come back to be a reincumbent.

ALL the same, I have been surprised to read even in our own press here in Scotland that Renzi is supposed to be one of the old guard in Italy getting his just desserts at the hands of the populists, citizens enraged by globalisation, immigration and a host of other grievances. On the contrary, he came in as a Mr Clean in 2014, having never had a national career but only served as mayor of Florence. A personable 41-year-old, he jogs, for heaven’s sake, in this nation of political dotards. He uses his speeches to make jokes (including his resignation speech). He is a blue-eyed boy of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, not at all an easy status to achieve: it defeated Dave Cameron, for example, despite his Etonian charm. And no other Italian politician could do any of this.

Mr Clean’s major project was a reform of the Italian Senate. If you think the House of Lords is bad enough, you should take a look in Rome’s Palazzo Madama where the Senate sits. It is not a hereditary chamber, but there are senators for life and the general incumbency makes it feel like they have been there for hundreds of years. Yet this collection of codgers has exactly the same powers as the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, and they cannot be overridden as in the systems of most countries. They are hardly the sole reason, but certainly one big reason, why Italy is so hard to govern.

Renzi wanted to cut them down to size, to rob them of powers and above all of democratic legitimacy, because they were in future to be indirectly elected. That is the stumbling block over which he has been sent sprawling. But his gleeful opponents, if they now get into power instead, will find the Senate just as capable of impeding them as it was of impeding him. And most of their policies are a good deal crazier than his.

This may all seem a long way from our own home life at Holyrood, but I think we have lessons to learn from this most amiable nation of our fellow Europeans before Brexit cuts off so many of our ties with them. When I was working in the Italian system, it always struck me that the Christian Democratic Party, while on the centre-right (sort of), bore most resemblance to the Labour party in Scotland. It treated its electorate as a tribe: practising Catholics, still a majority of the Italian population in those days, were expected to vote for it, and if they did not it might be so much the worse for them. The party itself was led by an orthodox elite which showed much more interest in its own internal politics than in the people it was supposed to be representing, and indeed found popular participation rather a nuisance.

In this way, the Italian Christian Democrats became insulated from the wishes of their civil society, just as Scottish Labour did in its own parish. Relations between party and the people turned clientelistic. Voters’ behaviour and politics in general developed into a contest over pork-barrel investment for special interests. It also allowed politicians to become corrupt.

I’m not going to say the SNP is following the same primrose path, but there are signs it is not always sure how to keep on the straight and narrow. It is a party led from the front, with the rank and file expected to fall meekly into line behind. It is not all that ideological, yet it is intolerant of dissent, preferring slogans and catchwords to any serious analysis of policy. It wants to be all things to all men and women, which may paralyse it when faced with difficult decisions, as in education and the health service. On the other hand it falls too easily for the blandishments of special interests. Still, it is not too late for the SNP to change. I would love Caledonia stern and wild to turn more like la bella Italia, but not in the ways I have just listed.