Is it just on women’s issues that politicians feel they must deal with the pundits?

Bit of a coup for Sarah Vine, Daily Mail columnist (and wife of Michael Gove), don’t you think? Her piece on date rape elicited a trenchant response from Harriet Harman, who was indeed mentioned in it. I can’t think of many politicians who get down and dirty with a columnist like that; mostly they loftily ignore the brickbats or deal only indirectly with the pundits by countering their arguments without attribution.

Anyway, remarkably, Ms Harman isn’t letting this one go. Let me rehearse the arguments. Ms Vine had taken issue with the latest observations of the  Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, who declared that men must be able to prove they had consent from a woman in cases of alleged rape. We have, she says, to move beyond the ‘no means no’ debate.

Ms Vine responded ‘won’t men in rape cases automatically be presumed guilty until they can prove they have obtained consent?’ And she rather cast doubt over the mechanism for obtaining explicit consent: a signed form.