Snorbs - I am sorry you had to go through that with your ex-partner, but I absolutely stand by what I said about agreeing with my colleague's comments to this bloke.
Maybe he was fed up, maybe he had tried everything, but that certainly wasn't the impression we had from his conduct and that of his colleagues. I am afraid that sitting around smiling feebly while making no attempt to reduce the constant flow of drink to the table does not give the impression of someone dealing with a difficult situation to the best of their ability.
There is also the fact that the impression we were given by the comments from the couple's other colleagues was that this is a regular occurrence and that it hadn't occurred to any of them to take any steps to prevent this car-crash of an evening. A couple of my colleagues also had words with a senior member of their firm who was present - the event was strictly invitation only with our head of department being told he could bring a table of 10. We had a member of staff who was notorious for getting drunk and making inappropriate comments - she wasn't taken along for that very reason, and our head of department had a word with her after a couple of drunken performances.
So assuming that their firm was issued with the invitation in the same way, everyone chose to overlook the fact that she was highly likely to behave like this and to sit with her and drink large quantities of wine with her while she got more and more out of control. The senior colleague did concede that he should have seen it coming, but I didn't get the impression that any of them had genuinely taken on board the epic scale of her behaviour and humiliation.
Maybe you did everything you could in your situation, but I simply don't accept that this man, or this group of people, did the same. And I absolutely do not accept that it was appropriate, whatever the background, for him to walk away as she lay on the ground with her pants on show - by that time all she could do was flail around and rant at us as we tried to sort her out - her party could have physically carried her out of the room - they did eventually physically remove her but they let us try and deal with it first.
In the same way that not everyone who gets horrifically drunk is an alcoholic, not everyone who sits by and watches it happen is a loving but powerless partner - some people are just a bit crap.