Rennard's wandering hands

Nobody died. No one, as far as we know yet, was raped. The tale of the wandering LibDem hands is taking too much space in the media.

Today on the World at One the leading item was a long interview with a Lib Dem county councillor who cried on the phone to Daddy several years ago when someone paid her insistent and unwanted attentions one evening. Oh please.

Now obviously it’s not good. But no one died (cf Mid Staffs hospital), and all these allegations are from articulate women who had chosen to join the sanctimonious PC party with the aim of being able to lay down the law to others. So did they take a principled stand? Did they hell. Despite being so very hurt, the wee dears preferred to keep their complaints informal. And what did they do when no action seemed to be taken? Nothing whatever. But now with the reappearance of Chris Rennard in Lib Dem committees a few years later, several of them have been ever so brave and gone public to the media.

Quite why they couldn’t just have emailed Nick Clegg we will probably never know.

Now, there’s nothing edifying about this. The concern in the sanctimonious party’s hierarchy seems to have been to make the whiff of scandal go away. The allegations were known in Mr Clegg’s entourage, but he didn’t know anything “very specific”. Seemingly he did know of general concerns, so he must have chosen not to ask. Quite what the difference is between “specific” and “very specific” I’m not sure – it’s probably the phrasing of someone trying to sound as if he knew less than he actually did.

Of course a man can’t understand blah di blah. Just saying, it doesn’t deserve quite so much news time.

This month we learned that thousands of people have been dying in our hospitals who shouldn’t have died. They weren’t healthy, ambitious, articulate people with strong principles keen to speak for others. They were ordinary people who were ill – and they’re a subject senior politicians of all parties seem not to want to touch – in the case of Labour for reasons that are all too obvious.

Today’s right-on World at One got its news values wrong.