A kiss is just a kiss? Oh no it’s not - Aidan Smith on Luis Rubiales controversy

If only Luis Rubiales, the man at the centre of Kissgate, had stayed a little longer at Hamilton Accies. He might not be in quite so much trouble now.

The Spanish football president - whose kiss on the lips of Jenni Hermoso has been dubbed a MeToo moment not just for his country but women in sport - spent the end of his playing career in the Scottish Premiership although the stint was brief. A pity, as the Accies were his only club outside his native country and South Lanarkshire could have shown him that greetings in public can differ from place to place and culture to culture. Then again, judging by his macho posturing, maybe he wouldn’t have taken a blind bit of notice.

What a stooshie, as they say in South Lanarkshire (but not Las Palmas where Rubiales is from). Spain’s women win the World Cup. Rubiales is excited, very excited, over-excited. There are hugs for the players filing past him on the podium as they collect their medals - and then for Hermoso a full-on smacker. But it was consensual! No it wasn’t! You must resign! No I won’t! Then you’re suspended! See you in court!

Honestly, before the fallout I watched the ceremony with sneaking admiration, the kissing with some envy. Here was a country that in every sense knew how to embrace celebration. Man, woman, player, official, they were all so continental about it. Tactile, relaxed, not remotely buttoned-up.

I said to myself: bet they all grew up in close-knit families where lunch was alfresco and long and delicious food involving oodles of life-enhancing olive oil with some wine for the older children - a big, convivial, joyful scene. A romantic notion perhaps, but as a set-piece of so many foreign movies, there must be a basis in truth here. Yes, everyone from a Hispanic or Latin country greets everyone else in a friendly and sincere way. No one is socially awkward, not like us.

Or is that just me? I have been married to my wife for 17 years and have known her and her family for even longer. Yet every time there’s to be a get-together I’m beset by etiquette panic. Which fork? Can I get away with mouthing the hymns in church or do I need to be heard even though I can’t sing for toffee? And right at the start, do I kiss my dear mother-in-law once, twice or, crikey, three times?

It’s three in some regions of France and I don’t know if the south-west, where maw-in-law lived for some years, is one of them. I don’t know the form, full stop. In France they kiss on Main Street, sang Joni Mitchell. And not for nothing is doing it with tongues known as French kissing. I mean, we invent hollow-pipe drainage and suchlike. There is no such thing as Scottish kissing. There’s the Glasgow kiss, of course, but that’s something different.

In Spain they kiss on Main Street, too. In football, more and more players in England kiss when a goal is scored and doubtless this is the influence of the big influx of foreign stars. In Scotland by and large we continue to hold out against it. When Margaret Thatcher was introduced to the Celtic and Dundee United players before the 1988 Scottish Cup final there was no kissing, and the fans chose to greet the then prime minister with a chant of: “You can stick your f****n’ poll tax up your a***.”

One of Thatcher’s successors, Theresa May, wasn’t kissed on the lips by Donald Trump when she became the first world leader to meet him as US president - but recalling that 2017 White House trip this week he was overbearing in a different way. “I have no idea why Trump held my hand,” she said. “I thought, I’m capable of walking down a slope, thank you very much.”

In Kissgate no one is backing down. Rubiales alleges he’s a victim of “social murder”. The football federation, standing by their man, have produced four images which they claim show Hermoso lifting the president’s feet off the ground during the embrace. Hermoso has countered: “In no case did I seek to raise the president.” And if you thought reaction to the controversy wasn’t quite hysterical enough, Rubiales’ mother has just announced from a locked-up church that she’s on hunger strike until her son is cleared of any wrongdoing.

A kiss is just a kiss? Oh no it’s not. History’s most famous kiss symbolises the jubilation at the end of the Second World War, sailor George Mendoza grabbing dental assistant Greta Friedman for a spontaneous pucker-up in New York’s Times Square, captured in an unforgettable black-and-white photograph. Now, amid an era of white hot sexual politics, the whole world is forensically analysing the most notorious.

Could it bring about an end to kissing? Not in the privacy of your own home, perhaps, but maybe in full view when the kisser and kissee are prominent people with cameras present and reputations at risk.

In the course of work I have been kissed by a handful of interview subjects. Among them Zoe Ball, the actresses Helen McCrory, Maxine Peake and Andrea Riseborough, and most memorably Betty Blue star Beatrice Dalle. In each case this was a peck on the cheek - two from Dalle - simply to say thanks and goodbye. But I can’t pretend I didn’t enjoy them, or dine out on them. I’m a man, after all (just not a Spanish man fond of grabbing his own crotch).

But no more kissing? Maybe it’s safer. The next time I see the mother-in-law I think I’ll just curtsey.