Is the Westminster scandal a watershed moment? Probably not, but any progress is welcome as this point

A wise commandment passed down from on high by Andrew Marr in his 2004 tablet on journalism, My Trade, is that a columnist should never write a column on other columnists.

He is right, but having spent the weekend convulsing under the kitchen table like a petrified cat as one catastrophically bad take after another explodes in the night sky, exceptions must be made.

Not unlike last night’s Blue Planet 2, so dense is the weight of utter garbage closing in above our heads that soon no daylight will penetrate, and the Westminster sex scandal will have reduced the nation to a desperate mass of cannibalistic Humboldt squid.

At the end of a truly dismal week of allegations, Peter Hitchens wants to talk of dressing the “squawking women” of the nation up in niqabs. Charles Moore has come to the conclusion that it is in fact the harassed, assaulted and otherwise abused women who are “on top.” It is a surprise to find oneself turning to the words of David Brent in such time, but guys, “there’s been a rape up there!”

Now, any vaguely sentient man goes wandering down this particular avenue alive with a sense of trepidation, but by Monday lunchtime, all three main parties (and yes, one of them is the Lib Dems) were dealing with allegations that a young woman in their midst had been raped and subsequently advised to keep it quiet.

It is a surprise, in such times, to read a woman, in this case the otherwise customarily brilliant Clare Foges in The Times, arguing that “The sisterhood is turning women into victims.”

I am not a member of the sisterhood so what do I know, but it looks to me like women are the victims here.

In what world, when there are rape victims out there who appear to have been told to be quiet, are people firing up the laptop to type out words like: “By ‘calling out the patriarchy’ at every clumsy flirtation, some self-described feminists are, unwittingly, constructing invisible barriers to female ambition.”

Hitchens concludes that it will end with men having to walk around Westminster with “chaperones”, a conclusion that you can only reach if you’ve not spotted the fact there are roughly 400 or so male MPs who, so far, have not had to apologise for anything. Whose hands, to the very best of public knowledge, have never strayed under a dinner table.

Let us focus, for a minute, on the “minor” crimes. The brushed knees, the lunges. How can a Deputy Prime Minister, many have asked, face calls for his job over a possible hand on the knee and a suggestive text?

To this entirely outside observer of the righteous rage of womankind, they do not appear like minor crimes to me. To me it seems like a female political journalist has the same right to a boozy lunch with a cabinet minister as a male one, without getting lunged at in a Westminster ante-room at the end. Julia Hartley-Brewer may not mind that she had her knee touched multiple times by the same man, but here is a question worth pondering for as long as the lawyers will allow. For how many years does a man touch a knee, or go in for a non-consensual kiss on the lips, if such tactics never work?

If women want to live in a meritocratic professional world it appears, at least to me, that the sisterhood does not help itself by waving off such incidents as if they do not matter.

Should a deputy prime minister lose his job for a suggestive text to a woman 30 years his junior over a picture of her wearing a corset in a newspaper? Erm, I dunno. Maybe yeah, actually. Maybe he should. Why should a woman have to suffer such grave indignity?

We are told, heads of political parties are getting together to formulate some sort of plan to stamp this kind of behaviour out. It will be very, very hard to stamp out, in a world where, whatever Charles Moore reckons, the balance of power is so fundamentally out of whack. But if it starts with powerful men being absolutely scared to death of extending the hand under the dining table, or, sending suggestive texts to women 30 years their junior, then that will be a tremendous leap forward. In the meantime, it comes as a great surprise to me, that anyone would wish to diminish that kind of progress.