Why didn’t Bridget Harris just slap Lord Rennard?

When I was promoted to being editor of a programme at the BBC, back in the late 1990s, my line manager came and talked to me in a deeply mysterious manner for a number of troubling minutes. He was wary and elliptical and I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. There were things you could do as a deputy editor, he told me, that you couldn’t do as an editor. But he didn’t tell me what those things were, those things which I now couldn’t do. I just sat and nodded wisely. Only later did I realise that this was his ‘Don’t shag the staff’ speech. That was the thing you couldn’t do — the staff. I hadn’t been aware that as a deputy editor I could do the staff. I wish I had known. Quite horrible to think that this opportunity was now denied to me.

I was reminded of this by the continuing Lord Rennard saga, which has been running now for a little over ten years and rather wonderfully shows no signs of abating. If you had ever thought for even a nanosecond that you might be tempted to vote Lib Dem, this whole hilarious business should put an end to that. I genuinely believe that some of the actors in this drama are psychologically damaged individuals, wrapped up in their pointless furies, unable to see the forest for the trees, determined to exact revenge — and destroy an individual — for the slightest of slights, consumed as they are by an absurd ideology. And in response, the party behaves without a shred of moral fibre or principle. Never ever vote for these people. They’ll take it as a come-on.

When I say psychologically damaged I do not mean Lord Rennard himself, although he has presented evidence of great depression and illness as a consequence of his ludicrous and malevolent hounding.