Pinch This

Christopher Pincher sexually assaulted two men, and having been drunk would have been no defence to that even if he had denied it, which he has not.

There used to be a Carlton Club in Consett. What does Pincher think would have happened to him if he had done that there? Or if, even now, he were to do it in that town's thriving Wetherspoon's?

This is not a storm in a teacup. It is a terrible insight into what passes for normal behaviour among those who govern us. It is also an example of how something can be shocking without being remotely surprising.

The sexual abuse of young men who were trying to make it in politics, not exclusively but nevertheless usually perpetrated by men, has been an unspoken fact of life forever. Yet it is still quite something to be confronted with the stark fact that caught at it, even a Deputy Chief Whip cannot really see what the problem is.