It’s years too late, but at least Ed Davey is learning from the Epstein horror

On Friday afternoon, Ed Davey found himself in a tight corner. For days he had pontificated in public about Peter Mandelson, friend of the predator Jeffrey Epstein and member of the House of Lords.

The Liberal Democrat leader does a good line in moral outrage. In the Commons last Wednesday he opened his batting at prime minister’s questions in sombre tones said: “I have been thinking about how victims of Jeffrey Epstein, and the victims’ families, must feel.”

Last Tuesday he took to Radio 4 to call for deeper reform of the House of Lords: not only should Mandelson lose his seat, but the entire chamber needed a new system for purging miscreants.

Whoops. All that was too much for Alison Goldsworthy, one of four women whose complaints were the subject of a 2013 party inquiry into Chris Rennard, a Lib Dem peer and one of the party’s most powerful men.

Goldsworthy’s story is not new to Lib Dems, but as she reminded Davey in a letter last Thursday: “In 2004, as a 21-year-old candidate in the European elections, I posed for a group photo after a black-tie event. Stood next to Lord Rennard, then Lib Dem chief executive, and wearing a long, backless dress, he put his hand down my gown and inside my knickers, past ‘extremely intimate areas’.”

At the time, he was the man who could decide how much party funding she received as a candidate.

Rennard has always denied these allegations, despite Alistair Webster KC’s findings that “the evidence of behaviour which violated the personal space and autonomy of the complainants was broadly credible”. Both he and the complainants maintain that this inquiry was botched.

The inquiry studied four complaints, but Channel 4’s Cathy Newman reported at the time that more women had come to her with allegations, which “follow a very similar pattern”. Rennard initially refused Webster’s recommendation that he apologise, although he later did partially and grudgingly

Rennard has remained active in the House of Lords, holding the Lib Dem whip. Last Wednesday, hours after Davey fulminated about sexual abuse victims in the Commons, Rennard was standing in the Lords to intervene in two key policy debates.

No wonder Goldsworthy cracked last week.

Like all the women who gave evidence against Rennard, she has left the political party to which she gave her youth: she now lives on the US east coast, putting an ocean and a continent between herself and her former political family.

During media inquiries into the Rennard scandal, a journalist wrote her an email, which I have seen, warning her that Rennard was allegedly circulating stories about photos taken by her boyfriend when she was 17 years old.

Last Thursday, Goldsworthy wrote to Davey after his call for Mandelson to lose his Lords seat. “The least you could do for victims and survivors,” she wrote, “is to apply the same rules to your party.”

Davey pulled out of an interview on Channel 4, but on Friday, probably suspecting that Newman and I had seen the correspondence, he acted. More than a decade after the allegations against him were found “broadly credible”, Rennard has finally lost the Lib Dem whip in the Lords. To give Davey credit, his response to Goldsworthy begins with the words: “I am so sorry.”

With Keir Starmer’s prime ministership on the ropes, this story can only be a sideshow to last week’s ructions. It will be greeted gratefully, however, by women in Westminster. Female MPs watched in mounting rage last week as a story about how much machismo, misogyny and sexual predation we are prepared to tolerate has somehow become a story about whether Mandelson also leaked market-sensitive information to Epstein from Downing Street.

There should be no suggestion Rennard, who continues to assert his innocence, is comparable to the monster Epstein. Goldsworthy was not a child, like many of Epstein’s victims, nor were any of her fellow complainants. But if we accept her allegations, she was a young woman in the orbit of a powerful man who felt her body was his to access – and who then watched for years as his colleagues sniggered, quibbled over and diminished the scale of that violation.

For many women, the revelation of the Epstein emails is not their glimpses of depravity, but their macho juvenility. The world’s financial elite trade the same jokes about female genitalia as a set of 12-year-old boys. Mandelson appears to have swum freely in this sea of misogyny, regardless of his sexual preferences. On either side of the Atlantic, this is the background against which a woman who speaks out about sexual assault becomes just another punchline.

There are two ways the Epstein-Mandelson story could leave a mark on parliament. We are already seeing the first play out: a narrative about insider trading and national secrets, a classic crisis about who knew what, when, with the potential to take down a prime minister.

The second option is a deeper kind of reckoning: a reassessment of the cultures that treat women’s bodies as playthings and punchlines.

Davey, to his credit, has shown that his party is ready for it.

Photograph by Ben Montgomery/Getty Images, Roger Harris/House of Lords