I suppose Silvio Berlusconi thinks that he is doing his best for Italy’s image on the world stage. The trouble is that the rest of the civilised world has moved on from the days when men were expected to be patronising prats while women twirled in minimal clothing for their delectation. Now that sort of thing is a minority perversion and Western Europe looks on in amazement as Italy persists in error.

Perhaps it was to be expected of a tycoon who built his empire on the back of a bunch of desperate ‘vallette’ keen on hitting the big-time by parading in small outfits on Italy’s private television networks, but finishing all washed up at 35 and working in an escort agency. If you can make it in New York you’ll make it anywhere, as Frank Sinatra sang, but if you make it in Rome, that’s where you’ll stay, moving from screen to dustbin for aged Barbies.

The portrayal of women on Italian television is a source of endless fascination to those of us who are not Italian. Advertisements depict ‘clever’ women smartly performing household chores while admiring men look on and wise grannies dispense advice. Occasionally, a particularly dirty-looking husband - in the literal sense of the word - is thrown into a handily located washing-machine for a thorough cleaning, wearing an ‘I’m such a naughty boy’ expression while his wife, in full make-up, high heels and a ‘completo’ by Armani, plays the role of Mamma to her cheeky pseudo-son.

Meanwhile, back in the Italian advertisement kitchens, where there are no dustbins and no washing-up piled high in the sink, the sole role of men is to sneak tastes of food - cheekily, it goes without saying - which women are cooking. Those women have hair that falls in graceful waves to their shoulders, and though there is not a plastic clip in sight, not one strand winds up in the insalata.

The man hangs around behaving like a toddler while the woman smiles nicely and doesn’t tell him to get the hell out of the kitchen if he can’t make himself useful. Instead, she uses a bottle of olio extra vergine as a flirtation device.

In this scenario, our 21st-century Italian casalinga has ditched the outfit she put on for the trip to the land of sapone di Marsiglia and is now wearing an ‘abito casual’ composed of a pristine, starched white shirt encasing her to the wrist - while she whips up some salsa di pomodoro for her marito - and the sort of skirt that Marilyn Monroe might have worn for a bit of breathy writhing on camera.

The difference, of course, is that these are not Marilyn’s famous hips we are talking about, but something that has been reduced by cooking-while-only-pretending-to-eat to the proportions of a 12-year-old boy. And that just leaves me wondering why the women wearing hardly any clothes on Italian television shows are shaped like Jessica Rabbit, while the women doing the washing and cooking in Italian advertisement are shaped like teenage boys.

Ah, I get it. It’s because some women are there for sex and some women are there for housework, and in the minds of Berlusconi Man they’re in different compartments. The ones who do sex don’t do housework, and the ones who do housework don’t do sex.

The portrayal of women on Italian television is even odder when you consider it in the context of real life outside television in Italy. Italian women put other European women to shame - not because of the way they dress or the way they look, which is really quite ordinary and often even shabby - but because of the way they work.

You would be hard put to find an Italian woman under 55 who doesn’t work, and many of those over 55 will have worked for years but are now retired. Italian women of childbearing age can’t rely on Nonna to look after the bambino because Nonna is working even longer hours than Mamma.

In Italy, work for women is not only about money and the household income. It’s about dignity and self-respect and holding your own. Real Italian women are smart, tough cookies with jobs and careers, but Italian television women are just a Berlusconi fantasy so far removed from life that they might as well be wearing pink gossamer wings and waving magic wands around to grant wishes involving food and sex, the first provided by pubescent boys in wigs and make-up and the second by Jessica Rabbit.

As for Silvio Berlusconi, even his billions and the fact that he is prime minister are now no longer enough to exert an aphrodisiacal pull on women. Once a man becomes a joke, the only women who will sleep with him are those he pays to do so, and sometimes not even then.

Listen to ‘Sandra’, a nightclub dancer paid e1,000 to go to Berlusconi’s New Year’s Eve party in Sardinia, quoted in the new book Papi: A Political Scandal. She was lying on a guestroom bed when Berlusconi walked in. “His face was coloured with something that looked like self-tanning lotion and it stained his hands too, making them seem greasy. His heels were high….He held a bag full of jewels.”

An orange Father Christmas in high heels? Send out a search-party for Johnny Depp.

Another woman who spoke to the press said: “I’ve worked in the theatre and I know about make-up. He had a lot on. It made him look orange and when he laughed you could see the wrinkles.”

Sandra was just one of several escort-girls who were paid to attend the house-party. In a bizarre mating ritual or courtship display, the equivalent of a baboon displaying his scarlet bottom, Berlusconi lectured them on politics, showed them films of his meetings with Important People in International Politics, sang songs (he used to be a crooner on a cruise-liner) and fiddled about with an obscene pencil sharpener, a small rubber figure of a man with his trousers down which moaned when he turned the pencil.

Sandra said this made Berlusconi “laugh like crazy.”

Somehow, I just can’t picture the legendary Steve McQueen doing that. Or Barack Obama.

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