Yes, he would have done better to keep his cool. Yes, he should have remembered that gibes, particularly barbed-wire ones, sting hardest in translation. Yes, he must have known that telling a German that he would be right for a bit movie part as a Nazi concentration camp “trusty” was not going to add to the sum of brotherly love.

But there is a sickening hypocrisy about the righteous harrumphing in Berlin, where Gerhard Schröder stooped to the stagey ploy of putting calls from Rome on hold, and about the pompous strutting in Strasbourg of the offended “dignity” of the European Parliament. Dignity had gone to the dogs, a whole slavering pack of them, well before Berlusconi bit back.

The occasion was a formal one, the presentation that takes place at the outset of each rotating EU presidency. Berlusconi treated it with appropriate seriousness, delivering an accomplished, thoughtful speech. He, and the country he leads, were entitled to the customary courtesy of an adult debate on its substance.

What did he get? Before he even opened his mouth, a raucous claque of Green and left-wing MEPs waved placards plastered with the best insults they could plagiarise (the favourite, “No Godfather for Europe”, was a lift from Der Spiegel’s oh-so-witty cover story). His speech was greeted by a barrage of invective, all of it ad hominem, much of it infantile, some of it contemptible — the French Communist’s calling the Berlusconi Government “barbaric” or the Belgian MEP’s accusing him of laying Italy waste as did Attila the Hun. Martin Schulz, the deservedly obscure German Socialist now enjoying his 15 minutes of fame, was the last in a discreditable line-up of nincompoops who disgraced democracy by their inability to tell the difference between free speech and the political equivalent of a wrecker’s demolition ball.

The Parliament’s Speaker spinelessly ignored this trashing of protocol, bringing down his gavel only in defence of the last to provoke offence. To demand a formal apology from Berlusconi, after that, reminds me of a gaggle of Nobel peace laureates who once, at Hiroshima, spent three full hours expatiating on the evils of the Bomb without once mentioning that Japan had plunged Asia into war. Parliament owes the Italian Prime Minister an apology of its own.

Right, then. The rowdy Red-Green bunch conspired to drown out Berlusconi’s speech because it is not just Citizen Berlusconi the media tycoon whom they fear and detest, but his ambitions to make Europe less bureaucratic, more outward- looking and capable of adult partnership with America. Nor will they forgive his inexcusable presumption in asserting that Italians have as much right as the French or Germans to be heard in Europe’s councils.

Berlusconi thinks out of the box. He has petrified his diplomatic service by suggesting that if the EU is to work with America as a “a world power”, it should expand dramatically — to Russia, “with its military capabilities”, to Turkey, even to Israel. He relishes contradictions, emphasising Europe’s Christian identity but also closer links with the largely Islamic world south of the Mediterranean, championing lower taxes and massive public works projects in the same breath.

As his Strasbourg speech underlined, for those prepared to listen, he thinks ambitiously. That is what made this freewheeling tycoon a logical choice to lead Italy out of the morass of debt, maladministration, restrictive practices and bloated welfare bills, and revive its entrepreneurial zest. What Italy needs, “Europe” needs too: bold voices to challenge the Brussels consensus and the outworn Franco-German model of “social Europe”.