What should we make of the resignation of Italian prime minister Romano Prodi, following his coalition’s defeat in a vote of confidence in the upper house of parliament, the Senate? British commentators might reassure themselves ‘but that was Italy’, assuming that anything as colourful as punches flying around the woolsack couldn’t happen here. Not in the Lords’ present moribund condition, perhaps, but could it in future?

Italian journalists, by the way, haven’t written up yesterday’s events as if it were yet another humdrum day in the dysfunctional life of their nation’s politics. They sense something ‘un-Italian’ about it all, one paper describing it as like a scene from The Sopranos.

And the events in the Senate had an aura of over-the-top, couldn’t-happen-in-real life TV drama: the smallest governing party which resigned from the coalition because its leader was implicated in a corruption case (he, by the way, was Justice Minister) and which therefore caused the confidence vote, split with one of its three senators trying to vote to save the centre-left government, until he got roughed up by his party colleagues. He was stretchered out of the hall.

The question for Italy is now: is their country ungovernable?

Prodi says it is ungovernable, under the present electoral system. He – with the equivalent of the CBI and, seemingly, the President on his side – argues that reform needs to precede any move to go to the polls. The issue is not so much the electoral laws Berlusconi rushed through in his last gasp as PM, which bolstered whoever won the election by giving them extra seats in the Lower House, but a deeper problem. It’s the ‘perfect bicameralism’ of the constitution which has caused the most recent crises. Twice Prodi has had to fight a confidence vote, twice he’s won in the Lower House, twice he’s lost in the Senate.

The question for us is: how can we make our parliamentary system something close to a representative democracy and avoid the imperfections of perfect bicameralism? We would like to see an elected Upper House, on STV. We should surely want to give it teeth, rather than keeping it as the neutered beast it is now. We would want to avoid the provision for life senators that occurs in Italy – though that provision gave the Prime Minister a glimmer of hope that he could remain and stability be achieved.

But would we enjoy the consequences? Will we end up throwing punches or popping corks?

* David Rundle is Liberal Democrat deputy leader of Oxford City Council, and blogs at de moribus liberalibus.