Hare-brained hysteria and the death of British sense of fairness

What will historians of the next century make of the fact that at a critical juncture in our history, when we were engaged in momentous negotiations over the future of this country, our media and political classes were obsessing about allegations of sexual misbehaviour?

Will they say, as many political sages are suggesting, that this feverish selfexamination marked what the BBC’s deputy political editor John Pienaar yesterday portentously called ‘a defining moment in our social history’?

Or will historians conclude that Britain – or the inhabitants of the so-called Westminster village – was gripped by a kind of mindless frenzy which is redolent of 17th-century witch-hunts, when innocent people were wrongly accused and justice suspended?

I strongly suspect the latter will be the prevailing view. If nations can go mad, ours has done so in the past week. and according to Mr Pienaar (who in this regard is a typical representative of an overwrought media class) we are only at the very beginning of this process. God help us if that is true.

Of course, I don’t deny there have been some extremely serious allegations of rape and sexual assault, such as that made by Labour activist Bex Bailey, who claims she was raped by a party employee in 2011, and then discouraged by a senior official from reporting the attack. Police are now investigating.

But such grave charges are greatly outnumbered by accusations of hands on knees, pinched bottoms, untucked shirts, unsuccessful lunges either in taxis or elsewhere, and a host of unspecified incidents which come under the umbrella of (dread phrase) ‘inappropriate behaviour’.

I don’t dispute that these allegations are disturbing, and should be looked into. But it is regrettable that conflating them with really serious allegations has the effect of taking our attention away from what is far more shocking.

More worrying still, it can’t be denied that normal standards of fairness, and the assumption that people are innocent until proven guilty, have been jettisoned as hysteria runs riot.

It seems – as was the case when old-fashioned witch-hunts got going – that almost anyone can be accused without evidence being required or justice invoked. take the case of Damian Green, who is effectively deputy prime minister.

Last week, 31-year-old Kate Maltby claimed Mr Green had ‘fleetingly’ put his hand on her knee in 2015. Not the most serious accusation in the world, but serious enough to harm Mr Green, who has no way of proving this didn’t happen – as Miss Maltby has no means of proving it did.

Even worse, he is being strung up by a retired senior policeman. Bob Quick says that when police raided Mr Green’s offices in 2008 (a disgraceful case, by the way, since Mr Green, then a shadow minister, was merely suspected of a political leak) they found extreme, though legal, pornographic material on a parliamentary computer in his offices.

this really is a base charge since the computers have probably long since been removed, and Damian Green may well have no way of demonstrating that what Mr Quick alleges is false. Maybe the former policeman has a secret agenda. Possibly one of Mr Green’s aides had a penchant for hard- core pornography.

Or conceivably Mr Green had a taste for porn, and did place an unwanted hand on Miss Maltby’s knee. We’ll never know for sure because both contentions are unprovable. Innocent or guilty, Mr Green has been irrevocably dam- aged. another example of justice denied concerns the Conservative MP Charlie Elphicke, who was told last week by party officials that the tory whip had been suspended, and unspecified sexual allegations against him referred to the police. Mr Elphicke claims that the media were informed before he was. Was that fair?

Yesterday’s papers produced another crop of lurid and unproven tales – for example, a tory MP supposedly jumped on a male Labour MP in a taxi – in some of which names were not mentioned, but the impression fostered that members of parliament are sex-crazed beasts.

the normally quite sensible tory MP andrew Bridgen alleged that he had overheard some female colleagues discussing the supposedly ‘inappropriate behaviour’ of fellow tory MP Dan Poulter. So now it’s allowable to publicise unsubstantiated second-hand allegations – and possibly ruin a colleague.

Meanwhile a Conservative whip called Chris Pincher has referred himself to police after being accused of attempting to untuck the shirt of a muscle- bound Olympic rower called alex Story ... in 2001!

Very few of these stories could be profitably investigated, far less lead to a prosecution. Yet they are seized on by the voracious 24-hour media, and treated virtually as established crimes.

NOTE that many of them are of pretty ancient vintage. Damian Green is supposed to have had pornography on his computer nine years ago. Mr Bridgen’s allegations go back to 2010. Chris Pincher’s alleged shirt tugging was almost in the last century.

and Sir Michael Fallon, who resigned last week, repeatedly put his hand on Julia hartley-Brewer’s knee 15 years ago, while we learnt yesterday from freelance writer Jane Merrick that he made an unsuccessful lunge at her 14 years ago when she was a junior political reporter.

Is it possible that Parliament in 2017 has fewer gropers and kneetouchers than Parliament of ten or 15 years ago? It is an inconvenient thought for those who would have us believe that the current Palace of Westminster is a cesspit of sexual deviance.

We should also contemplate the possibility that some of these stories are driven by people with an agenda: feminists who want us to believe men are brutes and sexual predators and MPs who have old scores to settle with colleagues.

there is obviously a problem of sorts, and let the parties with their new disciplinary committees investigate allegations – as long as justice is preserved and MPs are not assumed to be guilty before they open their mouths.

SURELY

they deserve to be treated as fairly as the rest of us. It is widely assumed, following the admittedly highly discreditable expenses scandal, that they are all on the take. Now it is becoming a lazy article of faith that a great many of them are sex pests, too.

I’m certainly the last man in the world to be sentimental about members of parliament, but if they are subjected to the hue and cry of a witch-hunt spinning out of control, democracy will be the casualty.

and so, too, will the authority of the Government at a critical moment in our history. though a number of men in the Labour party have had the finger pointed at them, too, many are trying to lay the blame at theresa May’s door in the hope of bringing her down – and possibly reversing Brexit.

Jeremy Corbyn, who had shown no interest in sexual abuse until the day before yesterday, and has several important questions to answer about his own party, is cynically trying to jump on the bandwagon by ventilating idiotically about our ‘warped and degraded culture’.

My hope is we won’t have more weeks of insanity, and that the story will die of exhaustion – yesterday’s papers were struggling to find juicy new scandals. But we shouldn’t underrate the advantage all kinds of people have in maintaining the hysteria.

are we a serious nation? If we continue much longer with this harebrained witch-hunt in which traditional British virtues of fairness and good sense are heart-breakingly absent, the answer will be an unequivocal No.