The door of the aircraft had just been opened. The president of the French Republic was standing at its archway. Being a state visit, the official cameras were rolling, sending live video around the world.

As two junior officials moved around the perimeter of the screen, we see an extraordinary thing occur.

Two hands, clad in red, emerge from outside the camera’s view and smack the president. One hand pushes his face, the other his jawbone. President Macron is visibly surprised and physically flinches, before recovering quasi-spontaneously, in the knowledge of being observed.

Some moments later, the President emerges from Cotam 001, followed by his wife.

Brigitte’s red outfit, and her direction of travel, confirm that the smacking hands were hers.

As the couple proceed down the aircraft steps, she does not, as has been her custom, take his available hand in hers.

***

To the dispassionate eye some things are quite clear.

We have witnessed a domestic dispute; the smack had sufficient aggression to make a man flinch; the froideur between the two, following the incident, was plain; had the smack been reversed, and Macron filmed hitting his wife, his presidency would have ended before ever stepping on the warm, humid soil of Hanoi.

The Elysée Palace first claimed the footage was fake, thus inadvertently confirming that it was potentially (to use a charming political Irish-ism) grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented. The Palace then accepted its veracity, and claimed it was a candid moment of tomfoolery between a loving couple. Nothing to see. Rien à discuter.

But there’s plenty to talk about, and those denials amplify the need.

Unless captured by religious zeal, regular people will not accept the refutation of that which their eyes have plainly seen. So, why the two-fold coverup? Are we now to consider that not only is the first marriage in some difficulty, no matter how passing, but also that the President of the Republic is entangled in an abusive relationship?

Speculation packs tenfold into that space which reasonable explanation might ordinarily occupy.

French commentators, witnessing the fleeting event on live TV, stumbled to articulate what they were seeing. One younger reporter was ahead of his colleagues in the processing. ‘If my wife hit me across the face like that, she would no longer be my wife’, he said.

***

The Vietnam Smack is especially concerning for Macron’s political life because it speaks to lingering suspicions of presidential character. Emmanuel famously married a woman 24 years his senior. And infamously, he met his wife when he was a minor student, aged 15, and she was in a position of power, as his drama teacher.

We are each entitled to live complex lives, and to live them privately. But an electorate has a vested interest in tracking the persona and personality of its successful candidate who, in this case, occupies France’s highest office.

In 2017, many voters were prepared to read the teenager’s passionate pursuit of Brigitte as an act of prodigious clarity, coupled with outsized maturity. In short, Emmanuel’s extraordinary marriage said something of how extraordinary a man, and leader, he must be.

But there have always been other theories of the case. And, in Vietnam, one theory now shines all too brightly.

Politicians implode not by the visiting of crises, but by the visiting of revelation. Voters dislike the surfacing of concerning character in someone they ought fully to have known.

***

On a human level, I found the images of the Vietnam Smack disquieting.

I hope the president is OK.

I do not like to see a man humiliated. No one deserves that. Macron himself knows it only too well. He once scolded a stroppy teenager in front of cameras in Mont Valérien, when the kid failed to address him with the commensurate dignity of the presidency. Such things, he has always known, are important.

But the opening door of the presidential aircraft revealed Macron in a liminal space. To the waiting cameras he was already the French president. To his wife, standing in the wings and removed from the door well, he was a man. And one undeserving of dignity, at that.

Many years ago, Michael Stipe, the lead singer of REM, began dramatically to lose weight to the point of creating public anxiety. Rumours circulated that he had contracted HIV/AIDS. In an interview some time later, Stipe expressed how he hated the headlines and felt persecuted, until realising that real human concern lay behind the speculation. He was loved. And because fans cared for him, they worried for his health.

Stipe released a public statement, confirming that he did not have HIV, and explaining that his weight loss was due to poor dietary choices during touring. He was committed, heretofore, to a healthier lifestyle.

So that was that.

Politicians tend not to amass the ardour accorded to rock stars. But they do accumulate respect.

I certainly respect Emmanuel Macron. I want him to be well, both physically and emotionally; as a man, and as president. In order for the Vietnam episode to rest, I believe Macron must address it again, and with more candour.

Like Stipe, the President must set regular people’s minds at ease. Because part of the price of holding high office is acknowledging human concern.