The Lady Bracknell response to groping can be an ideal reprimand
Tales of sexpestery are like the No73 bus: another three will be along in a minute. Only this time, the story from Daisy Goodwin has a distinctly different tone.
Goodwin, who writes the ITV series Victoria, reports that during David Cameron’s administration, she was summoned to No10 to talk about an idea for a programme. She chatted to an official, whom she has declined to identify but who was a few years younger than her. He said her sunglasses made her look like a Bond girl. At the end of the meeting, the man put his hand on her breast. “I looked at the hand,” Goodwin recalls, “and then in my best Lady Bracknell voice said: ‘Are you actually touching my breast?’”
Knowing Daisy as I do, I can well believe it when she says he dropped his hand and laughed nervously while she “swept out in what can only be called high dudgeon”. A star graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, blessed with an intellect that is as formidable as her embonpoint, Daisy is not to be messed with. And three cheers for that.
“I wasn’t traumatised,” she tells Radio Times, “I was cross.”
Daisy went public with the story not to threaten the idiot groper, but as a “plea that there are some occasions when a woman needs to summon her inner Lady Bracknell or Queen Victoria and give the offender a withering stare and call him out. There are occasions when that is appropriate and sufficient, and I think women are the best judges of when that is.”
I couldn’t agree more. If a man goes low, women should scale the withering heights.