Virginia Blackburn

PITY the poor citizens of Tinseltown. In their eagerness to virtue signal, pitfalls are everywhere. Remember when Benedict Cumberbatch called for more opportunities for thesps in the ethnic minorities and accidentally used the phrase “coloured actors” instead of “actors of colour”? You’d have thought the sky had fallen in. Anyway, the latest to fall foul of the politically correct is gorgeous pouting Scarlett Johansson. What has she ever done except be gorgeous and pout you might ask, and 99 per cent of us would agree with you. But in the eyes of some people, Scarlett has committed a crime that it almost too heinous to contemplate: she attended this week’s Met Gala wearing a Marchesa gown.

And very fetching she looked in it too but that did not stop howls of outrage filling the air. For one of the cofounders of the label is the designer Georgina Chapman, who until quite recently was married to Harvey Weinstein.

When the ordure hit the propeller about what he’d been up to over the past few decades, the couple started divorce proceedings and there has never been any suggestion whatsoever Georgina had a clue about it. But by wearing a dress designed by his ex, some people seem to be suggesting, Scarlett is not taking Weinstein’s alleged crimes as seriously as she ought.

But what if, in her choice of dress, Scarlett was standing up for wronged women everywhere? The red carpet brigade has avoided Marchesa ever since the scandal broke, with the result that not only has the totally innocent Georgina discovered she’d been married to a sleazeball but she faced seeing her business go down the pan.

What if Scarlett felt that was a little unfair and was doing her bit SHOCK FROCK: Scarlett Johansson in Marchesa