Did Donald Trump have kompromat on Emmanuel Macron within the secret files seized by the FBI from his Mar-a-Lago Xanadu? One of the files is known to have been titled ‘Info re: President of France’. And Trump is known to have bragged for years that he knew details of Macron’s sex life. Well, possibly. There’s plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest that Macron is not entirely conventional in the sexuality department, not least in his marriage to his former drama teacher, 25 years his senior.

Maybe the spooks of the CIA are better informed than me, but it’s very hard to imagine that Macron has conducted illicit sexual affairs since he was elected president. The president of France has scant opportunity to conduct extra-curricular liaisons without this being noticed. Perhaps the tame Paris media did its best to conceal the affairs of D’Estaing, Chirac, Mitterrand and Hollande from the public for as long as possible, but none were exactly secret from insiders and the era when such matters remained concealed has passed.

A friend of mine, who worked closely with Macron at Rothschild’s before he became a minister in François Hollande’s government and eventually president, said that he was if anything a rather asexual figure, in love mainly with himself. It’s true that there have been plenty of rumours. Early in his presidency, Macron himself weirdly volunteered that his former bodyguard Alexandre Benalla was ‘not my boyfriend’. Benalla was certainly an exceedingly odd character in the presidential entourage. He was eventually taken into custody on suspicion of corruption, influence peddling, forgery, money laundering, misuse of diplomatic passports and impersonating a police officer. He was subsequently sentenced to three years in prison. It has been suggested by some that Benalla may have been closer to Macron’s wife, Brigitte, than to the president himself.

Macron has frequently been photographed with young men and this has fuelled rumours that he is gay, but by now it might be imagined that if true, there would be some corroboration. Rolling Stone magazine has rolled up as much as it can about all this and it’s pretty thin. ‘Trump bragged he had “intelligence” on Macron’s sex life,’ the magazine reported this week. Trump has told some of his closest associates — both during and after his time in the White House — that he knew illicit details about the love life of Macron, two people with ‘knowledge of the matter’ told the magazine. ‘The former president even claimed that he learned about some of this dirt through “intelligence” he had seen or been briefed on, these sources say.’ Trump was light on details said the magazine’s sources, but as a notorious gossip peddler for decades, it’s difficult to know if any of what he says is grounded in reality. ‘It is often,’ one of the sources says, ‘hard to tell if he’s bullshitting or not.’

It’s attractive to imagine that Macron’s Elysée is a hotbed of illicit sexuality but, disappointingly, even those who have little respect for him have very little of substance to offer. Macron is not a product of the sexually incontinent generation of soixante huitards. His mentors, the likes of Jacques Attali, are not mentioned among those known to have blurred the lines between public trust and private lust. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I reckon there’s less to this story than meets the eye. Macron strikes me as more of a narcissist than a sex maniac.