In his messianic tract of personal beliefs, Ingvar Kamprad, the Swedish founder and guiding spirit of the Ikea furniture chain, exhorts others to use every minute of the day constructively: “Divide your life into 10-minute units, and sacrifice as few of them as possible in meaningless activity.”

The crowd who turned up last week for the launch of his latest Ikea store in Edmonton, north London, evidently took his words to heart. Within three 10-minute units a fist-flailing riot had put six people in hospital, laid out 20 with heat exhaustion and stripped all 500 special offer sofas from the stacking shelves.

At his home in Switzerland, where Kamprad lives with Margaretha, his second wife, the 78-year-old recluse must have wondered how, once again, the most perfectly aligned plan had gone pear-shaped with no Allen key to fix it.

Amid the scenes of mayhem on Wednesday night bargain hunters abandoned their cars on the North Circular, crushed each other in the store entrance and fought for possession of choice items. A woman was threatened with a wooden mallet. Ikea claimed its security staff were overwhelmed by 6,000 maddened shoppers, three times the number they expected. Police complained that because the store did not give them accurate numbers only two officers were present.

Kamprad, who drives an 11-year-old Volvo and travels economy despite being one of the world’s richest men with a fortune of $32 billion, is familiar with most forms of Ikea rage. The common variant was contracted famously by Russell Crowe, the Hollywood actor, who was driven apoplectic by the instructions for his baby’s cot and attacked the flatpack pieces with his pocket knife before summoning help.

Nor has the self-assembled billionaire and former Nazi sympathiser been able to curb the dementia that afflicts Ikea shoppers who, having parked, queued and shuffled through the store like sheep, discover the “Billy” bookcase they sought is out of stock and instead arrive at the checkout with a trolley load of cheap impulse buys they don’t want.

More serious is Ikea mass hysteria, of which a recent outbreak in Saudi Arabia might have served as a warning for last week’s events. In September three men were trampled to death and 16 shoppers injured in a stampede to claim £80 vouchers when Ikea opened a store in Jeddah.

Kamprad is absolved of blame as he no longer plays a part in the day-to-day running of the global concern. Five years ago he emulated King Lear by pitting his three sons Peter, then 36, Jonas, 33, and Mathias, 31, against each other to see who excelled. The firm is operated by a charitable trust and its owner is a mystery.

But Kamprad’s stern and frugal ethos still pervades Ikea’s 202 stores in 32 countries. Thanks to him almost twice as many people visit a branch — Britain now has 13 — as attend church. According to one estimate 10% of Europeans were conceived in an Ikea bed. Ingvar Kamprad is Ikea in a literal sense: the name is an acronym consisting of his initials, plus E for Elmtaryd, the family farm in Sweden where he was born, and the A for Agunnaryd, the village where he grew up.

The colossus he built in meticulous detail was prone to disasters from the start. When Ikea opened its first Stockholm shop in 1965, Kamprad erected two signs outside, one neon and one that swung in the wind. A gust sent the swinging sign smashing into the neon light, starting a fire that reduced the shop to ashes. “There are few people who have made so many fiascos in my life as I have,” he conceded once. An admitted alcoholic, he began hitting the sauce in the early 1960s when suppliers in Poland plied him with shots of vodka. With regular drying-outs “to clean out my kidneys and liver”, he indulges himself at his own vineyard in Provence.

But this peccadillo pales into insignificance beside a Swedish newspaper’s revelations in 1994 about his nine-year friendship with Per Engdahl, the openly pro-Nazi leader of the Neo-Swedish movement. Engdahl attended Kamprad’s wedding to his first wife, Kerstin, in 1950.

Kamprad claimed he did not remember if he belonged to the Nordic Youth, Sweden’s equivalent of the Hitler Youth. When accused soon after of establishing Ikea with Nazi money — a claim never corroborated — he replied: “They could have accused me of murder, but not of borrowing money.” Yet he was contrite in a letter to Ikea staff. “You have been young yourself,” he wrote. “And perhaps you find something in your youth you now, so long afterward, think was ridiculous and stupid.”

In 1998 The Sunday Times exposed the impoverished circumstances of Romanian workers who supplied Ikea with products. The company admitted conditions were poor but said it had no management responsibility over the plant.