A kind reader, who was trapped in Rome with her three pre-teenage children by the British Airways glitch, has written to say that, whilst wearing a black lace mantilla and queuing to enter the Basilica, she was accosted in St Peter’s Square by ROBOPOPE.

The device can apparently utter more phrases than previously recorded. The robot approached her, gesticulated benignly, and told her in stentorian tones (and in Castilian Spanish): ‘No rigidity here!’

Her children were terrified, and have subsequently joined a Pentecostal Methodist Sunday School.