The other much-hyped portrait of the year so far is the first painted likeness of the Duchess of Cambridge, by Paul Emsley, unveiled last week by the National Portrait Gallery. Some of you must have seen me disliking it on the BBC news, because you have kindly written in to point out that I, too, am no oil painting. No arguments there.

Yet I realise it was wrong of me to describe it as “disappointing”. I apologise unreservedly. It is substantially worse than that. It’s not just that the composition has been crudely borrowed from a passport photograph, or that the lack of proper texture gives Kate the complexion of an embalmed corpse. The very worst thing about the picture is that Emsley has managed to make Kate Middleton look like Edwina Currie.