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The Sun's orbital motion around the Solar System barycentre contributes a small quadrupole moment to the gravitational binding energy of Mercury. This moment has until now gone undiscovered, but it actually generates 7arcsec/cy precession of Mercury's perihelion. Consequently, the residual 43arcsec/cy allocated previously to general relativity must in reality account for this new component and only 36arcsec/cy for general relativity. This means that the orbit of Mercury is grossly incompatible with the vacuum solution of GR.