Naivety and a wilful blindness to uncomfortable facts define this era

Mohammed Al Fayed now joins the ranks of abusers and rapists who used their power and money to muzzle their victims – Jimmy Savile, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Rolf Harris, Stuart Hall, Max Clifford, Gary Glitter… etc.

Each time one of these monsters is stripped of his reputation we feel things must be better now, and that in the past we were hopelessly naive.

Old school feminists had a different view of predatory men. “Why didn’t you just kick him in the nuts?” they asked their sensitive, younger sisters in the #metoo movement.

But modern thinking is that rather than kicking him in the nuts and leaving it at that, we should have called in HR and the police. We nut-kickers were guilty of wrongthink.

In recent years many historical wrongs have been rightly highlighted – the infected blood scandal inquiry, the Post Office Horizon inquiry and the more recent Grenfell Tower inquiry. But highlighting is not quite the same as “righting”.

Families of more than 300 victims of those infected with HIV and hepatitis C in the 1970s and 1980s now feel they are being “excluded” by the current rules. Many of those wrongly convicted in the Post Office scandal have yet to have their convictions overturned.

And while the Grenfell inquiry turned a spotlight on the construction industry, councils and regulators – the web of blame and corruption is so complex it is unlikely that justice will be achieved in a generation.

At least we are addressing these festering scandals. But imagine how – in 20 years or so – we will regard some of the social problems we are blithely storing up for ourselves right now.

The unforeseen consequences of the pandemic are felt in terms of the thousands of children who no longer attend school, and the widespread practice of Working From Home is changing society in ways we cannot possibly predict.

The vast number of those off sick and on benefits is a huge challenge, and while the relentless focus on mental health sounds positive there is a downside to reaching for victimhood so readily.

And as for a generation of children who believe they can assume gender on a whim – it doesn’t bear thinking about.

So while it is good that the old Harrods perv has been outed, don’t imagine that we are getting everything right now. Naivety and a wilful blindness to uncomfortable facts are always with us.