Janet Daley:

Some serious allegations have been made. But this isn’t at all like the Major government’s implosion

Well, it got Brexit negotiations off the front pages, didn’t it? For a wild moment last week, I thought that was part of the plan. This was really a clever ploy to distract the nation from the problem of EU deadlock. Nothing like a good smutty story to catch the public’s attention. And the whole thing was so very odd. When the country was faced with the threat of seemingly unpreventable terror attacks as well as European negotiations crucial to our economic future, the public discourse was dominated by what seemed at the time to be a hand placed on somebody’s knee 15 years ago? Seriously?

No, this had to be a deliberate diversion. But then, whose purpose could it serve? Revelations of the Tory incidents were certainly convenient for Labour, whose own scandals seemed far more damaging. One of the most ardent new Corby-nite MPs, Jared O’Mara, had been exposed not only as a brazen sexist lout in the past, but is alleged to have used threateningly aggressive language to a woman very recently, although he disputes this. Further, a female Labour activist had revealed that she was raped by a party figure and then advised not to report it. This stuff is in the domain of actual criminality. Then, quite coincidentally, somebody releases a little list of Conservative peccadilloes that was allowed to become so gratuitously damaging to the Government that you might suspect it had come out of the Kremlin’s Destabilising-the-West factory.

But, of course, it didn’t. This was no carefully concocted outsider’s plan. What mattered was that the release of that toxic list, however it happened, which included open and perfectly consensual sexual relationships along with the supposed infractions, was treated with credulous gravity by the Prime Minister and her front bench. It was that response that made the whole business seem so weirdly disproportionate.

So was Downing Street happy to use this material as a distraction from its actual problems, or perhaps as an effective way for Theresa May to present herself as united with her female colleagues on both sides of the House, as opposed to the embattled, divisive and weak figure she generally seems? Or could it even be a diabolical move to discredit particular individuals who were a threat to her own leadership or to the prospects of the man she is now believed to favour as her successor, Gavin Williamson, whose appointment as Defence Secretary is regarded as – that word again – so very odd.

But awakening from my conspiratorial reverie, I decided that it was none of these exciting things. It was just phenomenal, breathtaking stupidity. This is what happens when political leaders are desperate – when they lose their nerve and their sense of direction and are searching for something to say that will be different from the things they were saying last week.

Before going on in this vein, let me confront the obvious accusation: yes, I do think the way men in power sometimes behave toward women (and junior male staff, too) is appalling. Yes, I agree that there is a problem with what is now called “the culture”.

Some serious allegations have now been made. But there is also a pernicious dimension to the matters that have been under discussion for this past week. “Inappropriate” – unlike rape, assault and harassment

– is not a criminal offence. It is not even a legal term. Even if we could all agree, with total unanimity, on a definition that was not subjective and impressionistic, instances of it would still be almost impossible to substantiate in ways that would justify a career-ending judgment.

How can the accused prove a negative – that such-and-such a thing didn’t happen or was misrepresented? The only way of establishing a definitive defence against a criminal allegation is to provide an alibi: I was somewhere else at the time. But this is only applicable for a specific incident, not a running attitude problem or a continuous tone. Talking about witch-hunts is not, for once, hysterical exaggeration: an accusation that cannot be disproved cannot be given the same evidential status as an assault.

But here we must ask the question that no one seems to be putting: does any form of sexual misbehaviour automatically disqualify someone from political office? What about the notorious adulterer, David Lloyd George, who is generally viewed as the founder of the modern welfare state? Or John F Kennedy, whose predations were known by insiders to be of almost sociopathic proportions, but who inspired a generation of young political idealists?

A few people are suggesting that this has the flavour of the mid-Nineties, when John Major’s government was split by the Europe question and sinking under a wave of sleaze allegations, which ended with a Labour landslide. I remember that time and I don’t think this is the same at all. The national debate about Europe has now been settled in law by the referendum. So the side that lost must be devious and disingenuous in fighting for its cause, always officially insisting that it will support “the democratic will”. That puts the whole EU discourse on a different plane.

As for “sleaze”, much of last week’s incarnation was more likely to make voters laugh than to scandalise them. That is, if they paid any attention to it at all. Most people were more concerned with last week’s interest rate rise than with the roving hands of Cabinet ministers. If they were moved to anger, it was by the self-indulgent Westminster discourse that was dominating the news cycle.

And the biggest difference between now and then, of course, is that Labour in those days was presenting itself as an utterly plausible alternative government. If you are worried by Corbyn’s apparent popularity, do note that even with the hopeless May government in power, Labour’s poll numbers are just past breaking even with the Tories when they should, by all rights, be 10 to 20 points ahead.

Yes, there is a problem: the testosterone-driven ambition that leads men to seek power is also conducive to arrogant sexual incontinence. What is the solution? I have no idea – but

I do know that McCarthyism and licensed vengeance cannot be the answer to anything in a free society.

This is what happens when political leaders are desperate – when they lose their nerve and sense of direction