The witch-hunt at Westminster does women no favours
MP Lisa Nandy, who said she had showed evidence to her on three occasions that party whips had used information about sexual abuse to demand loyalty from MPs.
“I asked her to act, and on three occasions she did not,” she said.
Mrs May said: “Where there are any sexual abuse allegations that could be of a criminal nature...people should go to the police”.
A senior Downing Street source said at least one of Ms Nandy’s questions appeared to refer to an alleged assault on a child in the 1970s, and she had been seeking reassurance that the inquiry into child sexual abuse would look into allegations relating to information held by whips.
Number 10 insisted Mrs May had responded to Ms Nandy’s questions, because the role of parties had been included within the terms of reference of the child sex abuse inquiry.
WE LIKE to think we live in an enlightened, liberated age. Yet a mood of puritan hysteria has suddenly descended on our political landscape, turning Westminster into an arena for wild allegations and lurid witch-hunts.
Whipped up by the fallout from the Harvey Weinstein scandal in Hollywood, this new Cromwellian approach treats clumsy encounters as dangerous sex crimes and awkward flirtation as brutish harassment.
It is indicative of our political climate that last night claimed the scalp of Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon.
Another target is the First Secretary of State Damian Green. Inoffensive in manner and conventional in outlook Green has usually been regarded as a bit of a drip. But with our sexual inquisition in full cry he has incongruously emerged as an apparent menace to women.
In a tale of woe about the “unpleasant” atmosphere of Westminster, journalist Kate Maltby claims that two years ago, during a meeting with Green, she “felt a fleeting hand against my knee – so brief it was almost deniable”. In another incident that supposedly revealed Green’s ravenous impulses he invited her for a drink after she had posed for a newspaper article in a corset.
Theresa May has ordered an official inquiry into Green’s behaviour while his colleague, noisy Tory backbencher Anna Soubry, has called for him to stand down from office because “what he is alleged to have done is outrageous”. In response Green strongly denies the charges from Maltby and has instructed lawyers to begin libel proceedings.
HIS action is understandable because, even on her own testimony, Ms Maltby’s catalogue of suffering does not seem to amount to much. The whole saga reeks of a desperate publicity stunt by a ferociously ambitious, attention-seeking young writer.
By her own admission she sometimes initiated meetings with Green and after he joined the Cabinet in 2016 she “exchanged many texts with him about political gossip”.
And if she was so terrified about inciting any whiff of sexuality why did she agree to appear in the national press wearing a corset? I have to confess that I was once asked to do a photoshoot in just a pair of long johns, having written an article about the joys of thermal underwear. I refused, fearful that the exposure of my Northern Irish bulk might be too much for the female population.
This week, in the timehonoured manner of a witchhunt full of unsubstantiated charges, a dossier of alleged misdemeanours by 40 Tory MPs has been feverishly circulated at Westminster this week. A large proportion of the charges seem nothing more than smears since they refer to consensual relationships or extra-marital flings. Infidelity might be unpleasant but it isn’t a crime.
Just as depressing has been the attack on humour, always a touchy subject for the puritans. During an appearance on BBC Radio Four, Environment Secretary Michael Gove joked that an interview with renowned interrogator John Humphrys is a “bit like going into Harvey Weinstein’s bedroom. You just pray that you emerge with your dignity intact.”
This light-hearted comment led to a predictable torrent of self-righteous condemnation on social media. “A complete disgrace,” cried one zealot. On Twitter, that vehicle for the congenitally offended, a poll found that 78 per cent thought that Gove should resign.
This febrile indignation is carried out in the name of female emancipation but it achieves the exact opposite. The new puritanism disempowers women and undermines decades of advances towards equality. Seeing every exchange through the prism of unbalanced sexual power this bleak doctrine denies the reality of normal human relations in all their capacity for friendship and fulfilment.
In the Cromwellian world the workplace is a cauldron of fear, conflict and depravity where female employees are at permanent risk. This promotes the worst kind of gender stereotyping, with men portrayed as predatory beasts and women as anxious wallflowers. Even worse, the inescapable logic is that women, for their protection, should stay at home or be segregated at work, just as macho misogynists have always advocated.
PURITANISM does women another terrible disservice. In its determination to indulge in outrage about masculine conduct it trivialises genuine abuse. Where the maladroit knee toucher is put on the same plane as the vicious rapist then all common sense has disappeared.
The political establishment should be concentrating on the real crimes against women, not this confected hysteria. Two women are killed in Britain every week while 1.2million annually suffer abuse.
The political correctness, which has unleashed the puritans on Westminster is the same dogma that has driven state indifference towards female genital mutilation, predatory Muslim sex gangs, socalled “honour” violence and forced marriages.
The 19th-century historian Lord Macaulay rightly wrote that there is “no spectacle so ridiculous” as a moral panic. What we need is genuine equality, not this bigotry and character assassination dressed up as women’s rights.
‘Flirtation is seen as brutish harassment’