HOIST BY HIS OWN FÊTARD

Acerbic newspaper columnists who wish to distil a human subject’s existence down to a nugget of scorn can always rely upon a fail-safe formula: hyphenated-descriptor + reductive noun form [h-d+rnf]. Whether it’s a veteran football manager being reduced to a ‘passion-sapping journeyman’ or a liberal-minded comedian to a ‘patience-testing snowflake’, it’s a tried and trusted way of spiking the editorial cocktail. (My all-time favourite appeared when Charlie Brooker, the man behind the dystopian sci-fi anthology Black Mirror, prefaced George ‘Dubya’ Bush’s name with “Teddy- Ruxpin-faced planet-vandal”.)

Presumably, cuttings containing these barbed descriptors rarely make it into subjects’ Project Life scrapbooks, but when calls you a 38-year-old “discotheque-hopping fiancé” — and the bride-tobe is 21-year-old Princess Caroline of Monaco, the daughter of Grace