Now, in a new interview, the 61-year-old hasn’t exactly helped his cause by boasting about how he has mastered the use of an iPhone.

Last month he missed the point that the trove of revealing “selfies” and other images of stars and models were snatched from Apple’s iCloud and posted online

The encrypted image files were automatically sent by smartphones into the data “cloud” as a backup, and the images were subsequently stolen by criminals.

Critics rounded on him for showing his lack of understanding of privacy protection matters.

This week he endeavoured to show his technological prowess, boasting he uses the internet ‘every day’ and finds it most useful.

The EU’s new digital economy and society commissioner can also operate an iPhone, he beamed to a German newspaper.

“I go online every day,” he told Passauer Neue Presse.

“Sometimes I even put my own appointments into the calendar using my iPhone.

“When I am searching for information, I look on the internet,” he continued.

“It facilitates things enormously.”

Oettinger said of the hacking scandal last month: “If a celebrity is stupid enough to take a nude photo of themselves and put it on the Internet, then they can’t expect us to protect them.

“There is a limit to how far you can protect people against their own stupidity.”