How couple were left unbuttoned

that so many models are given to drugs or tantrums, or both.

When Mrs Button was at the apex of her lingerie-modelling career – oh how brief the tenure, how fleeting the glory, how cruel the march of time – she was known as Jessica Michibata.

How it happened that Mr Button came into her life I can’t tell you.

But my guess, which may be wide of the mark by several parishes, is that Mr Button saw a photograph of Ms Michibata wearing nothing much more than a dark and brooding look and thought thoughts.

And once a red-blooded man thinks thoughts there are few immovable mountains.

In due course he went on to offer her his surname, all unaware that a little further down life’s joydrenched highway, the pair of them would be gassed like badgers and robbed.

The goods stolen included Ms Michibata’s engagement ring, which cost a quarter of a million dollars. Let us hope it was insured, though if it wasn’t I suspect the Buttons will cope.

For even if one disregards Mrs Button’s fees for being photographed in her knickers, the Buttons aren’t short of a bob.

Mr Button, you see, is a Formula One racing driver. And Formula One racing – el deporte moronico – pays nicely.

A few years ago, after a disappointing season, Mr Button took a 25 per cent pay cut, which slashed his salary to a mere $9 million a year. That’s $25,000 a day. How good it is to know that useful skills earn fitting rewards in this world.

Like many a racing driver, Mr Button has made his home in Monaco, where by some happy stroke of fate he is not subject to income tax.

But it wasn’t in Monaco that he and his wife were robbed. It was in St Tropez, a little further along the coast.

The thieves, apparently, pumped soporific gas into the airconditioning of the Buttons’ villa and then while the couple snored they wandered through the rooms picking over the valuables at their leisure.

It was only when the Buttons awoke feeling groggy that they discovered their loss and worked out what must have happened.

Well now, in the mid-80s a friend of mine married a French girl. The wedding took place near Nice and dozens of his friends and relatives made the journey from England for the knees-up.

And many of us, all unbeknown to each other, took the same overnight sleeper train from Paris.

I can still see the scene at Nice railway station the following morning. The platform was awash with upset English wedding guests. Dozens of them had been robbed on the train overnight. The thieves had been astonishingly audacious.

They’d stolen passports from beneath pillows on which heads lay, purses from handbags clutched to the chest, wallets even from inside sleeping bags.

Great was the distress, but great too was the uneasy wonder.

How could the victims have been so very deeply asleep, so utterly removed from the realm of consciousness, as to allow such thefts to happen? It was as if they’d been dead.

Then someone suggested the thieves had used gas.

And everyone immediately knew it was true. Of course. It had to be gas.

For one thing gas was typically foreign and underhanded. For another it absolved the victims of any lapse in vigilance.

How much nicer to think that they’d been gassed than that they slept like the dead and were as vulnerable as babies.

And because it was nicer they chose to believe it. Et voila, in one wee sentence, rather a lot of human history.