Silvio Berlusconi’s wheeze was inspired: world leaders at the G8 summit in Genoa two years ago would stroll down a walkway lined with lemon trees. But there was a hitch: it was not the lemon-bearing season. Simple, decreed the Italian prime minister — sew lemons to the trees.

Instead of scented bowers, all too often the media tycoon and buccaneering self-made billionaire has found his path strewn with banana skins. With no apprenticeship in a conventional political party he has never acquired the veneer of diplomacy.

There was the tumult that Berlusconi stirred shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, when he said people in the West had to be aware of the “superiority of our civilisation” over Islam, which was “1,400 years behind”. Commenting on Arab indignation, the newspaper La Repubblica said he had made the country “an ideal target for reprisal”.

All this was water off Berlusconi’s well-tailored back. With a fortune estimated at £4 billion, control of more than 90% of Italian television output and three newspapers loyal to him, he could afford to say “sorry” with a pearly smile.

However, last week he managed to launch Italy’s six-month presidency of the European Union by creating a stink that went round the world. Breaking a cardinal rule known as “Don’t mention the war”, he compared a heckling German MEP with a Nazi concentration camp guard. Mercifully, Berlusconi stopped short of performing a Basil Fawlty goose-step.

He was to plead provocation and claim that his remark was “ironic”. It was: the MEP shares a surname with the fictional German guard Hans Schultz in the television sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, which is being remade in Italy. Berlusconi suggested that the MEP should audition for the role. This context was lost in the diplomatic uproar and he was forced to express “regret” to Berlin.

In his defence, Berlusconi is proud of his family’s strong anti-Nazi record. His campaign literature describes how his father, a wartime soldier, escaped to Switzerland after the allied invasion of Italy in 1943 when the Germans were intimidating Italian troops.

Berlusconi’s mother, left to cope with her children and two elderly relatives, confronted an SS official who was rounding up Jewish women. “Everyone was paralysed with fear except my mother,” he recalled as an eyewitness.

“She went up to the official and screamed: ‘Go away, say you didn’t see anyone here’.

“The incredulous German pointed his rifle at her and said, ‘Shut up or I will kill you’. But she had the courage to carry on. She said, ‘Look around you: if you shoot me, you won’t leave here alive’.” Seeing the angry crowd the German departed, leaving the Jewish women behind.

For Berlusconi’s enemies, however, last week’s episode at the European parliament in Strasbourg proved the entrepreneur, 66, unfit to lead the EU. It came soon after the spectacle of the Italian prime minister aggressively defending himself in court against corruption charges while a law was being rammed through parliament to afford him immunity from prosecution.

Mercurial, short, balding and nicknamed the Cavalier, Berlusconi has an obsession with personal hygiene that extends to his staff, who must be perfectly groomed, perfumed and white-toothed. “Your breath smells; I can recommend a good dentist,” he told a shocked Italian ambassador.

Known also as the Great Seducer, Berlusconi has a reputation as a ladies’ man, which is no crime in Italy. Last summer he was photographed with his attractive personal secretary on a yacht in Sardinia after his second wife, Veronica, provoked comment by failing to join him at their villa on the island.