Is it fair to judge us by our teenage behaviour?

We can’t expect every public figure, male or female, to be faultless — saintly, even

Not much that happens in the US Senate sparks arguments in London playgrounds, but the extraordinary scenes that played out at Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Judiciary Committee hearing last week were the subject of a number of heated exchanges around the swing sets.

And, of course, you’d expect anything that manages to combine President Trump and #Metoo with the kind of meticulously drawn-out televised scenes we last saw on the BBC’S Bodyguard to get temperatures soaring. But what was it about this particular human drama that elicited such strong views?

We Brits may not be altogether detached in our judgment of Kavanaugh: not only is he Trump’s man, but the surges of rage and raw emotion he succumbed to as he testified would surely indicate that he’s unsuited to the job, whatever the truth of what happened in the summer of 1982, when the US Supreme Court nominee is accused of sexually assaulting Dr Christine Blasey Ford in a bedroom at a house party. As Confucius said: “A judge is judicious. Otherwise, he is not a judge.”

But we’re not as politically invested as the Americans either in whether or not Kavanaugh is confirmed. This is perhaps why the arguments on this side of the pond have centred on a different issue: namely, that since even the FBI will be hard-pushed to prove anything one way or another nearly four decades on, what kind of a precedent will this supposed “nontrial” set in terms of retrospective accusations towards men and women in public life?

During the past few days, I’ve been stunned to hear a couple of women I know admit to having experienced incidents not unlike the one Dr Ford recounted last week.

Like the 51-year-old professor of psychology, they buried or underplayed those incidents as something that they either erroneously believed was partly “their fault”, or a trauma they have tried hard to forgive and forget. Whether PTSD would indeed prevent one from remembering the day, month or year on which such a trauma occurred is another contentious issue, but there seems to be little doubt that, for some women, the footage has prompted unwanted, unpleasant or, indeed, downright horrific memories – and, for some men, sleepless nights to come.

That the hearing was so ill-advisedly turned into a show watched by 20million people worldwide won’t help assure future injustices one way

or another. Nor will it help assure the veracity or accuracy of any memories it prompted. But it may make it more appealing for women to come forward, which is both good and bad.

Good because, as the Why I Didn’t Report hashtag has proved, sexual assault and misconduct should never be discounted or dismissed simply because it happened weeks, months or years previously. Bad because when you add tricks of the fallible mind to the infinitesimal shades of grey that sexual interactions already generate, you might not be able to distinguish between true and false memories. And, no, “my truth” is not enough – not when a person’s life and livelihood is potentially at stake.

What cannot be allowed to be blurred by a climate or a hashtag are issues of morality versus illegality.

The two most obvious examples of this being the case of US comedian Aziz Ansari, who was burned at the online stake after the anonymous account of a 23-year-old woman detailing how he ignored her “clear, non-verbal cues” went viral; and the firing of Today show host Matt Lauer, for having indulged in the kind of consensual, extra-marital affairs that men and women in every industry have had throughout history.

We’ve all done things we’re not proud of – particularly in our teenage years – and if we’re going to expect every public figure, male or female, to be faultless – saintly, even – then nobody of any interest or ability is going to want to be in a position of power again. Already, it seems unlikely that the paucity of impressive figures in public life here in the UK is a coincidence.

Then again, perhaps with millennials, the weird and sexless generation of automata that they are, this is a moot point. By favouring a digital disconnect over human interaction, they are both turning themselves into precisely the kind of robots we need up there, making key decisions that will affect every aspect of our lives – and safeguarding themselves against any possible retrospective accusations of impropriety.