Polly Toynbee's article in The Guardian today is very good, I think:
What are the women whingeing about? If a grown woman can't handle a hand on her knee, she's probably not fit for the rough and tumble of the workplace. Men do try it on, but surely the women could politely tell the portly peer with the wandering hands that they're not interested. Why quite such a fuss when nothing much actually happened? Either these four women are over-sensitive or else they must be part of some conspiracy.
That's the gist of one side of the argument among Lib Dem peers who cheered Lord Rennard last week, two to one in his favour. Now the stand-off has been put back on ice: another inquiry and a disciplinary procedure to see if he brought the party into disrepute by refusing to apologise. He says he can't, for fear of being sued. Others say Nick Clegg should have sat him down and cobbled together one of those non-apologies that go "Sorry if some people have taken offence". But with blood boiling on both sides, this only freezes the dilemma. The party is in disrepute.
One MEP said Rennard's behaviour was no different to the bottom-pinching Italian men of yore. But most Rennard defenders adopt the kind of "common sense" attitude that has dogged every attempt to improve women's position since the suffragettes. Remember David Cameron's patronising "Calm down, dear" – there it was again in Clegg's complaint today that the argument around Rennard was "shrill". Such mild put-downs are harder to confront than full-frontal misogyny.
But these cases are deadly: Rennard's reputation is shot, but his four women accusers stand disbelieved, with their claims not "beyond reasonable doubt". With QC Alistair Webster's report being secret, all we are left with is the impression that one man's evidence seems to have carried more weight than four women complainants, sharia style.
For those who had never heard of Lord Rennard, in the teacup of the Lib Dem party he is a storming figure. Magician of Lib Dem byelection victories, many senior figures owe their selection, election or preferment to him. Few forget the whisker-thin Clegg-Huhne leadership contest when the Christmas post delayed the postal ballots. Those votes were heavily pro-Huhne, but the Clegg side demanded they be ignored: Rennard adjudicated in Clegg's favour.
So Rennard had immense power over the four women aspiring to be Lib Dem candidates. If he did what they claim, then surely only that power would have given this physically unprepossessing man the nerve to try his luck with younger more attractive women. Did an implied "come up and see my target seat" let a political supremo make passes at women well out of his league – or did they make it up and risk all for mischief?
Sexual harassment is all about power. When that phrase first flew across the Atlantic, we didn't know how to pronounce it: harassment or harassment? Nor did we know how bad it had to be before it counted, along the continuum all the way to rape. Back then groping, pinching and outright sexual threats were commonplace. New girls – and "girls" we were – were warned of the worst leches, that it was not safe to be alone in their offices. But no one complained because no one would listen, and it would mark you down as trouble and no fun. In a 1980s newsroom where I was the only woman editor, other women came to me wondering what to do about an editor who promoted via his bedroom and demoted those who refused. A man with power at work over a woman can never have a fair and equal relationship: how will it end, what happens to her if they break up? Whose job is at risk? Never his.
Costly employment tribunal cases taken by brave women may make men more circumspect. As cases are now unearthed from yesteryear, some complain they're from another age, another culture: if so, any culture change is only because some women dare to call out their abusers. But read the evidence from the Everyday Sexism Project and the change looks cosmetic, with more than 10,000 complaints about workplace harassment received last year – still so insidious, with victims so vulnerable.
How will women in politics feel on hearing these four complainants only suffered "behaviour that violates their personal space and autonomy"? Westminster remains a man's palace, its 22% women MPs too few to tip the balance. Neither Tories nor Lib Dems learn from Labour that the only way women break past men's barricades is with women-only shortlists and quotas. Douglas Hurd voiced what both parties think when he said last week that things are "slightly ludicrous" when parties think "there ought to be more women in this or that sphere of our life".
Tory politicians' use and abuse of women subordinates is well documented. The Lib Dems were always bad on women: around Jeremy Thorpe was a curious closet-gay coterie unwelcoming to women. Oddly, that unfriendly-to-women aura remained in not-gay David Steel's milieu. Lib Dem women's voices are few, with no uprising over this. Labour may promote more women, but more than one cabinet minister needed his women staff protected from slobbery kisses and aggressive fumblings.
Power may be an aphrodisiac, but it certainly gives otherwise unappealing men the chutzpah to imagine so. Touching up women at work is a way to exert power, often an act of aggression to keep them in their place: underneath it all, women's realm is the bedroom. The politics of sex are too difficult to navigate, men complain. At work, as at home, the only etiquette question is who has the power. And what women hear again from the Lib Dems is, "Not you."