Whatever Macron might say, violence is never really a joke

There are many things that belong firmly in the past, and I think we can all agree that The Crystals’ 1962 song “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)” is one of them. So it’s a bit of a stretch that the president of France is asking the world to accept his line about the incident everyone is talking about: she shoved me in the face and it felt like “joking” around.

- ROWAN PELLING

But that is what Emmanuel Macron would have us believe about the moment – caught on camera as he and wife Brigitte were about to leave their plane, having touched down in Vietnam – when his spouse raised both hands to his face and pushed him sharply away in full sight of cabin crew.

This autumn, I will have been married for 30 years. I sometimes lose my rag with my husband, but the worst I’ve ever done is yelled and stormed out of the room with a dramatic flounce. And that’s when no one was watching.

There is something profoundly, viscerally troubling about any kind of angry gesture directed towards a person’s face; a part of the anatomy that is so nakedly vulnerable at all times.

I was a child in the non-PC 1970s when parents still sometimes smacked their children’s bottoms as punishment for the worst misdemeanours, including my very kind mother. Even so, I remember Mum telling me that when an adult struck a child anywhere near the face, it was “the worst form of bullying and humiliation one person can inflict on another”.