Presumably, you don’t get to become head of football’s governing body in a football-mad country like Spain without putting in the hard yards. But if Luis Rubiales is remembered long for anything it won’t be the years he spent helping to creating the conditions which produced a world champion women’s team; it will be the five seconds he spent pashing one of its star players. According to worldsnogwatch.com the only previous kiss on Australian soil to attract international attention occurred in 1987, when half the Anglosphere saw Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue – then better known as Scott and Charlene – lock lips for the first time on Ramsay Street. Since then, Australian cameras have picked up only one instance of non-consensual celebrity intimacy worthy of syndication, and while that one was no less of an invasion of personal space it was of an entirely dispassionate nature. Like Señor Rubiales, Paul Keating might wish his legacy to reflect only his not inconsiderable services to his country, such as the deregulation of our banking system, the floating of our dollar and the introduction of our national superannuation scheme. But for some Australians he will always be remembered primarily as the prime minister whose republican instincts prompted him to manhandle a visiting monarch. This was enough to earn Mr Keating the UK tabloid honorific ‘Lizard of Oz’, but it did not disqualify his sculpted likeness from inclusion in Ballarat’s Prime Ministers’ Avenue, and since Mr Keating has been always a vocal supporter of indigenous rights it is unlikely that that modest bronze, or the much larger one outside his Bankstown alma mater, is destined for the same inglorious end as that which seems inevitable for the Lachlan Macquarie statue in Sydney’s Hyde Park, now that the court of anti-colonial lefty opinion has convicted NSW’s fifth governor of genocide. (Or that of James Cook which, being only a few metres away, makes its subject unequivocally complicit, notwithstanding the fact that the two men never met.) Indeed, in light of Mr Keating’s spirited vocal opposition to every initiative taken on every issue by the current Labor government, irrespective of the damage it does to his own legacy, some might think that if any statue of him was ever pushed over or defaced, the perpetrator would most likely turn out to be its corporeal original.

In the overlapping woke wakes of #Metoo and Covid it is perhaps surprising that anybody other than middle-aged married couples still kiss at all in the Western world. And for an increasing number of young, single Australians it is not just the fear of contagion or cancellation which would deter you. If you had witnessed every possible sexual act between men, women and domestic animals in the comfort of your bedroom before reaching puberty, as we are assured the internet has made not just possible but inevitable, merely kissing someone else on the lips must seem as antediluvian and labour-intensive as using an old-fashioned rotary dial telephone. And if climate catastrophists get their way, it won’t be long before the environmental cost of air travel will make it impossible for such ordinary people to visit the kind of cultures where osculation in one form or another still has a social role. In this respect, contemporary Australia might end up like 1960s Britain, when, prior to joining the Common Market and discovering holidays in Spain, the idea of two men kissing each other’s wives – let alone each other’s cheeks – was regarded with unbridled disgust by most right-thinking Poms. Being a product of one of those cultures, Louis Rubiales is no doubt more optimistic, as is suggested by the defiant stance he has taken against his detractors, and his refusal to step down. And it is not as if he has no precedent to cite in his defence. After all, if the Dalia Llama doesn’t get defrocked for asking a 12-year-old boy to give him a tongue sambo, why should an ordinary heterosexual man lose his job for being a tad over-exuberant in his response to an unsolicited hug from a beautiful woman? To quote Kylie, as I find myself doing more and more as I get older: I should be so lucky.