Bit of a coup for Sarah Vine, Daily Mail columnist (and wife of Michael Gove), don’t you think? Her piece on date rape elicited a trenchant response from Harriet Harman, who was indeed mentioned in it. I can’t think of many politicians who get down and dirty with a columnist like that; mostly they loftily ignore the brickbats or deal only indirectly with the pundits by countering their arguments without attribution.
Anyway, remarkably, Ms Harman isn’t letting this one go. Let me rehearse the arguments. Ms Vine had taken issue with the latest observations of the Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, who declared that men must be able to prove they had consent from a woman in cases of alleged rape. We have, she says, to move beyond the ‘no means no’ debate.
Ms Vine responded ‘won’t men in rape cases automatically be presumed guilty until they can prove they have obtained consent?’ And she rather cast doubt over the mechanism for obtaining explicit consent: a signed form. Funnily enough, this is exactly the scenario that the historian Andrew Roberts conjured up in his novel The Aachen Memorandum, about a nightmarish Brussels-dominated polity in which a man would be obliged to seek written agreement from a woman before having sex.
Ms Harman duly rode to Alison Saunders’ defence. ‘We’re not talking about a man making a mistake here, as Sarah Vine does. We’re talking about a criminal offence.’
As to the issue, this is fraught territory. Are we talking about men taking advantage of women who are too out of it to give informed consent to sex or, as Sarah Vine intimates, about women who engage in intercourse imprudently, regret it after the event, and then cry rape? The problem is of course that in situations where only two individuals are involved and it is the word of one of them against the other, it sometimes really is hard for juries to decide whether explicit consent was sought and given or could have been given at all. I suppose that’s what Alison Saunders means: if a woman is too drunk to say no, that, boys, counts as no.
Is it just on women’s issues that women politicians feel they must deal with the pundits, do you think? Nikki Morgan, the underwhelming Education Secretary who doubles as Equalities Minister, entered the debate over doing away with the Sun’s page 3, saying: ‘this is a long overdue decision and marks a small but significant step towards improving media portrayal of women and girls.’ That was of course, before the Sun made a fool of all of us, and returned naked breasts to page 3. But not before Jo Swinson, for the LibDems, had called on them to ban pictures of girls in bikinis while they were at it. The quarrel between high-minded women and the Sun is of course of long-standing; the bid to put a stop to it was initiated by Clare Short. But somehow, the Sun is different; page 3 is almost a state of mind we like to deplore, a useful shorthand for problem attitudes.
Ms Harman and Ms Vine actually seem to be talking at cross purposes here, which doesn’t make their spat less riveting. Ms Vine’s scenario is that of a woman who changes her mind about sex after the event. ‘Forget that minutes before the alleged assault you were twirling your bra around your head, or twerking in his face, or entwining yourself in his legs, or quoting from Fifty Shades Of Grey. Even as you urged him on — yes, yes, yes! — you still meant no, didn’t you?’ Ahem. Ms Harman, for her part, conjures up an analogy with a householder who leaves a window open a little and is then burgled. I’m not sure this exchange has exactly clarified the issues.
What is apparent is that Ms Vine is worth her bodyweight in gold to the Daily Mail, for whom a woman taking on a politically correct woman is a million times more useful than a man doing so.
As for me, the bit that caught me up short was Ms Vine’s introductory observation: ‘Let’s face it, we’ve all done it at one time or another. Shared a cab home with someone we shouldn’t have; invited the wrong guy in for coffee. Unless you’re a saint, the chances of getting through life without making at least one disastrous sexual choice are very small.’
Speak for yourself, Mrs Gove.
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