A brief scandal erupted last weekend during a visit to Ukraine by French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, when a couple of ‘suspicious’ objects they were handling were speculated to be drugs and drug paraphernalia.

They almost certainly were not, so let’s cut Macron some slack. He did hop on the official Elysee Palace social media account to clarify that, non, he was not doing rails while riding the rails to Ukraine alongside Merz and Starmer. They weren’t on drugs – just on good old-fashioned EU unity. Which, to be fair, seems to induce an equally brain-cell-crushing delirium.

“When European unity becomes inconvenient, disinformation goes so far as to make a simple tissue look like drugs,” read the post. So, Macron suggests, it wasn’t a party starter on the table, just the world’s most suspiciously placed tissue – alongside what appeared to be an unfortunately shaped spoon. And anyone suggesting otherwise is just spreading fake news. The press walked in, the photo went up, and the internet did what it does.

But the real dodginess started after they disembarked and got to work in Ukraine – presumably with clearer sinuses. But not from any drugs. Perhaps just from the sinus-blasting “industrial amounts” of Dior Eau Sauvage cologne that Macron is known for wearing, as Le Parisien’s Olivier Beaumont recently described it. Or not.

If they aren’t actually high, they’re sure acting like it. Finally, with Russian President Vladimir Putin proposing direct talks between Moscow and Kiev in........

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