I used to hate black tie City dinners and would do my utmost to escape them in my days as a crony capitalist. They were utterly boring with some prat like William Hague being paid £20,000 to tell the same tired old jokes as he did the year before, and with a lot of smug men congratulating each other after another high paid year of shuffling paper and creating no value for anyone but themselves. There were some women guests but they were usually just as boring and smug as the men. It is a joy not to have to make excuses about not attending such evenings these days as I enjoy my hermit like existence in Greece and Bristol.
The idea of these dinners being men only seems all the more odd. I had thought that the only folks engaging in such evenings these days were freemasons or homosexuals but then we learned of the awful Presidents Club dinner at which pretty young women hostesses were sexually harassed. The whole affair sounds tedious and ghastly and the behaviour of some guests was clearly worse than unacceptable. If some guests groped the hostesses, yes, they should be reported to the Old Bill. If the organisers tried to gag the women with NDAs then rightly they should be vilified. But the air of sanctimony and noisy self righteousness makes me think back to the industrial scale rape of young women and girls in Rochdale, Bradford and elsewhere.
At the Presidents Club the offenders were rich, largely white, largely Tory, old men. And they were businessmen and in today's climate being a capitalist is seen my large sections of the population as only marginally better than being a nonce. The victims were women who - by accepting such unpleasant work showed some degree of self confidence.
Many appear to have been well educated, students and post grads, earning a bit of spare cash. So the victims were often middle class and they were certainly not the most vulnerable in society. They were sexually harassed - largely - it seems in the form of relatively mid groping. That is not to say this is okay, it is clearly not but to put it in context....
In Rochdale and elsewhere the victims were what are often referred to as white trash, ill educated, poor, white working class girls who were clearly very vulnerable indeed. These girls were not groped but were raped, often gang raped and often on many occasions. Most were under-age. The culprits here were overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, Muslim Asian men.
I compare the howls of outrage from folks, especially on the left, and calls for immediate and drastic action about the Presidents Club with the stony silence from many of the same folk on the issues relating to Rochdale and other scandals even as events started to be reported on a national stage.
The crimes committed are clearly far worse in the case of the Rochdale and other similar scandals yet the media and Westminster elite seem more immediately aggravated by events at the Presidents Club. Is that because of who the culprits are or who the victims are or both?
Let me be clear there was wrongdoing in BOTH scandals and, proportionate, punishment is due for both sets of culprits but one is far, far, worse yet the outrage of the liberal elites seems disproportionate and weighted heavily towards the other scandal.
No doubt this statement of the obvious will offend some folks but offending people seems impossible not to do these days.