Where is Angela Merkel? The world’s most powerful woman appears to have pulled off something of a disappearing act, and Germans have been wondering where their chancellor is over the past week.

It’s not that Mrs Merkel has missed any official engagements; she is on holiday, as she always is at this time of year, and the vice-chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is chairing the cabinet in her absence.

It’s just that nobody seems to know where Mrs Merkel is or how she’s spending her time off. She is not on her usual walking holiday in the Italian Alps, though her husband, Joachim Sauer, is there — staying at Mrs Merkel’s favourite hotel with his son from a former marriage.

Her office in Berlin refuses to divulge her whereabouts, saying that it does not comment on her private arrangements.

The situation has set off whisperings about trouble in Mrs Merkel’s marriage — but she was seen with her husband on Tuesday night at in Munich, at a five-hour production of the opera Parsifal.