Charlotte Edwardes reports that Boris put his hand on her leg during lunch 20 years ago. Full disclosure, I put my hand on Boris’s leg 20 years ago during lunch. It wasn’t that I was making a pass at him. I just wanted to hold his attention while I was telling him something I wanted him to listen to. Now I am worrying. What if Boris and/or a cohort of other males come forward? ‘Mary assaulted me in a historic sex abuse incident. #SheToo.’
These are topsy-turvy times. Anything could happen and now I think about it, I’m sure I have been putting my hands on legs and generally assaulting men for years — absentmindedly.
But the past was a foreign country. They did things differently there. At one time it was honestly the norm for men to have their hands on the legs of the women on either side of them during dinner. I know this because Marigold Johnson (aged 90) told me. Moreover she added that when she and Paul Johnson were friends in the early 1960s, with the then famous journalist John Freeman, he told her that when he travelled to Switzerland to interview Carl Jung for his television series Face to Face, Jung kept his hand on the leg of the woman who would become Freeman’s (third) wife all the way through lunch. It was not foreplay to full sex, just a bid to make her feel welcome.
Marigold said she loved it when Freeman, while telling her the story, kept his hand on her leg all the way through lunch as well.
And indeed now that I think about it I remember assaulting Richard Ingrams as recently as about 12 years ago while we were both on a small plane in Jamaica.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in