Guess who’s back?

You just knew Lembit would make an appearance sooner or later, didn’t you? I only noticed this morning, reading back through some of the weekend papers I’d missed. Anyway, as the Rennard scandal spreads ever wider within the Liberal Democrats, step forward minxy Hannah Thompson, a former ’schoolgirl activist’. According to Hannah, when she was seventeen Lembit Opik somehow acquired one of her shoes and, referring to her as ‘Cinderella’, wouldn’t give it back until she kissed him. Who’d a thunk it. On another occasion he also invited the young lady to share a mudbath with him. Who could resist that? A mudbath with Lembit? And also – of course – he invited Hannah to his boudoir. She didn’t go. She didn’t have the mudbath, either. Lembit denies all of the allegations.

Increasingly the Lib Dems are portrayed as a party populated by desperate, drooling and rather sad men, and women who not only say no but regard every approach from a male as a grotesque transgression of their rights about which, for decades, they will continue to rage.