Lord Rennard’s hand-brushing is nothing. I’ll tell you what true violation is

‘In my opinion,’ says Alistair Webster QC, author of the Liberal Democrats’ internal report into Lord Rennard’s droit de seigneur-style pulling technique, ‘the evidence of behaviour which violated the personal space and autonomy of the complainants was broadly credible.’ I’ll tell you what behaviour that violates personal space is.

I was on a Nile cruise press trip: Aswan to Luxor. We were three hacks and a woman from the PR company. We’d done Edfu, Kom Ombo, Karnak, Thebes, the Valley of the Kings. In bed at night, if I shut my eyes tightly, I could see hieroglyphics emblazoned on the insides of my eyelids.

Our last night was spent at one of Cairo’s better hotels. The other two hacks were abstemious. The PR woman was permanently on duty. Every night had been an early night. I was ready for a good drink and this looked like a good place to have one. We dined with the hotel manager at a table in an enormous banqueting hall of gilt and polished marble.

He sat next to me. He was a courteous, civilised, sceptical man with Cupid’s bow lips and a feminine delicacy in the way he held his cigarettes low down between his middle fingers. In both appearance and spirit he reminded me of the Alexandrian poet C.P. Cavafy, of whom I am a devotee. He drank steadily and smoked throughout the five courses, eating little, and his staff attended to him with grave respect, replacing his ashtray with a clean one after each cigarette. His English was perfect and his conversation ranged far and wide. He had tried all the mainstream religions, he said, and believed Hinduism to be the most profound. Tomorrow he was leaving for a week of solitary contemplation in the Sinai desert.