The media's focus on the ex-Lib Dem may be more about the Eastleigh byelection and the Leveson report than any genuine concerns about harassment, writes Michael White
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Lord Rennard faces the media during his time as Liberal Democrat chief executive. Photograph: Cathal McNaughton/PA
When the former News of the World journalist Neil Wallis learned at the weekend that he would not be charged over the phone-hacking affair he shared his relief and anger with Radio 4 listeners; anger about both his own 21-month ordeal and the scale of arrests of fellow journalists during Operation Weeting. It all lacked "proportionality", he suggested.
I agree with that sentiment. But the trouble is that tabloid Fleet Street is the last place on Earth with any right to complain about disproportionality, about over-reaction by former chums at the Metropolitan police who turned a blind eye for so long, or about flamboyant dawn raids to seize persons and papers, tactics designed to scare suspects but which also frighten their kids.
Fast-forward to this weekend. Channel 4's accusations against Lord Rennard, the former Lib Dem elections strategist, were a slow burn. But by the time Nick Clegg returned from his weekend break with the Spanish in-laws to reverse an earlier denial that he knew anything about alleged harassment of party officials and activists, the story was leading all the bulletins I saw.
It's leading all of today's papers that I get through the letterbox, except the FT, which is still obsessed with the possible fallout from Britain's loss of its triple-A credit rating by Moody's. The Daily Mail has five pages on the Rennard affair before mentioning George Osborne.
The BBC, keen to prove its fearless credentials against its tabloid tormenters, is leading its bulletins on the issue this morning, though it's the same story as last night. The Guardian leads on it too and has a page inside.
Let's shine a bit of Wallis's proportionality on the case. If the allegations against Rennard are proved to be true, they are unpleasant. Young people should not be pawed, groped, propositioned by their elders, especially those in positions of authority. Rennard – an official few voters will have heard of – left his job as party chief executive in 2009 on health grounds. Perhaps the party should have been more robust in its response to complaints. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
But as far as we can tell, Rennard's alleged would-be conquests claim they were upset but not assaulted. It doesn't sound like the dreadful Jimmy Savile affair, though clearly that is the template from which the tabloids are hammering out their stories. Sexual predator stalking the innocents inside a high-minded organisation – BBC/Lib Dems – and the boss class avert their gaze. Cover-up!
That label is true in the Savile case – or that of Cyril Smith, the late Lib Dem MP. It should be added at this point that the macho tabloids were also intimidated by Savile and Smith – their public status, their bullying and manipulative power – though they never admit to their share of the blame. Surely sex scandals are their turf, not that of the prissy BBC.
Is this a sex scandal? By French or Italian standards – think Dominique Strauss-Kahn or Silvio Berlusconi – it would probably be regarded as a quiet evening at home knitting by the fire. But Britain takes a stern view nowadays of sexual harassment, and rightly so, though it does so in the context of a coarse public permissiveness about sex that would shock our parents.
Fashions in hypocrisy change, as they do in most things. Many female friends of my age, including my wife, have similar stories to tell of routine groping and propositioning, sometimes worse, in the workplace. It is not confined to politics or any other job, let alone to one party. Decades ago the future Mrs White was gently propositioned by a famous Lib Dem, but much more seriously threatened by a prominent leftwing journalist. On another occasion she and a fellow reporter were advised to hide in the toilets when they heard one particular tabloid boss was paying a visit to their office.
That was then. In 2012 things are different. Yesterday's Observer reported serious allegations of what sounds like rather more inappropriate behaviour against Cardinal Keith O'Brien, Britain's senior Catholic cleric. Given what we know of the papacy's systemic cover-up of abuse by clergy around the world, still lapping at the Chair of St Peter as Pope Benedict steps down, you'd have thought it more important than the Rennard case. The Guardian reports that the pope knew about the allegations. Sound familiar?
So one detail of the Rennard drama that puzzles me lies in another contrast between this and the Savile/Smith/etc cases. There the victims of serious and persistent assault were generally young and vulnerable women, troubled teenagers whom no one would believe and the police dismissed. Horrible (with hindsight). It is more surprising to learn that political activists of a liberal persuasion would not make more of a fuss – and do so at the time.
Some of these allegations, revealed on C4 News and subsequently expanded by gleeful newspapers, are 10 years old. Victims say their protests were brushed aside because no one would go public, though at least one said she would. Why not go to the police? Perhaps they did. I don't know. One is now an Oxford lecturer. They do not sound like scared kids from broken homes.
Which brings me to timing. On Sky News, also enjoying the scandal for all its worth, someone said last night that it was an unfortunate coincidence for Clegg that all this has happened when a crucial byelection is under way in Eastleigh, the former seat of Chris Huhne, yet another high-minded but dodgy Lib Dem. The Mail has listed them all today, way back to Jeremy Thorpe's conspiracy to murder charge in the mid-70s.
Well, it may be a coincidence, but it may not. A story which has been lying around for years (so we are now told, though I had never heard it) gets traction when something larger is at stake than knee-fumbling at a Swansea conference in 2003. All the parties have been pumping up mostly silly stories about each other in a contest where it is not clear who will take the first four places, or in what order – Lib Dem, Tory, Labour and Ukip – on Thursday night. There's also a "get Clegg" dimension to some of the analysis: anything to bash the coalition, which is, for better or worse, the only government we have.
But Tory Fleet Street has really gone to town to damage the Lib Dems' chances of winning Eastleigh. Despite Huhne, the Lib Dems have emerged as better than the Tories expected. The Conservatives have also done their best to build up their candidate, Maria Hutchings, who has been accident-prone. Good luck to them, that's politics, that's Fleet Street. Cardinal O'Brien isn't standing in Eastleigh and he doesn't live in London, so clearly it doesn't matter so much.
Beyond Eastleigh this is also about the Leveson report and the way the press should be regulated in future. The kind of politicians, journalists and police who enjoyed a cosy relationship before the phone-hacking affair blew up have fallen out and are putting distance between themselves and old chums. The tabloids are trying to convince their readers that politics is rotten and needs an unfettered press to expose its persistent crimes.
It's a phoney argument. Nothing in Leveson would stop them exposing wrongdoing in the public interest, though we'd all like to think they double-checked the police testimony that derailed Andrew Mitchell's career, before splashing it across page one. As for Rennard, let's have a bit more of clever Wallis's proportionality.