Can You Tell What It Is Yet?

“I can’t help feeling sorry for Max Clifford. He only groped a couple of wannabe’s, back in the day. Things were different then. It’s unfair to judge people on today’s standards for things that happened in the last century”.

How can you be so wrong?

Max Clifford was jailed. You might have thought it was different way back in the good old days when he was feeling women up in his office, but guess what? It was ILLEGAL. Back then. Back when some people thought it might be ok. Like one-for-the-road was ok. Like smacking one on your wife was ok.  It was against the law. And the sentences being handed down for these dirty old men are the tariffs for the offences at the time they committed them.

Yes Rolf, there are often times when “it takes two to tango”. But not when one of you is a grown adult man and the other is a frightened thirteen year old child. Yes Max, she wanted to be on Page 3. But that didn’t give you the right to touch ask her to take her top off and touch her breasts. Yes Jimmy, you raised a lot of money for charity – but that’s not the legacy you’re leaving behind in the nation’s memory.

Do we miss the Good Old Days? Those were the days when a girl couldn’t bend over to pick up a dropped paperclip in case her boss put his hand up her skirt. When she couldn’t smile at her colleagues for fear they would take it as a come-on. When she had to walk home from the station a different way to avoid being shouted at as she passed the building site. When her college tutor persuaded her not to make a complaint about the student who raped her at knifepoint because “these things are so often a misunderstanding”.

Dirty old men are being hung out to dry after a life-time of leering, lechery and illegal assaults.  These things are so often a misunderstanding – but if a few extra heads roll, it’s not going to trouble me over-much. In the overall cosmic scheme of things, if all the attention, the discussion, the debate, the jail-terms make someone re-think his own  behaviour, then it might just make a difference. Max is taking one for the boys, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.