By Peter Preston

The experience of the Leon Brittan and Ted Heath inquiries should remind the media that, even in a blizzard of serious cases, correct procedure matters.

Over a decade ago in Dar es Salaam, I was running a British Council seminar for journalists – a dozen or so men, half that number of women – from seven southern African countries. One afternoon we got round to work, sex and the whole murky drama now being played out on stages from Hollywood to the Palace of Westminster. And the women didn’t hold back.

“Look,” cried one Tanzanian freelance feature writer. “I want to get a piece published so I have to sleep with the editor. Then I want to be paid and I have to sleep with the cashier.” She was on her feet, blazing anger and cheered on by the other women – while the men skulked in silence.

They didn’t deny; they didn’t mutter formula phrases about “inappropriate behaviour”. They just took punishment. It was a brilliant, chastening spectacle. And I loved the fire and fury.

Which, in every sense, seems a long way from where we are now in the handsy world of touched knees and Michael Fallon’s warm places.

“The trouble with sexual harassment is that it isn’t as cut and dried as, say, burglary, because it’s not simply about what the perpetrator did,” writes Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian.

“Like other harassment offences, its legal definition relies on the victim feeling intimidated or humiliated – feelings that might in turn depend on her age, life stage, confidence and temperament but also, crucially, on the power dynamic.”

In short, it’s a movable feast of indifference or outrage: and there is no single answer, no single set of rules (or benign Commons investigatory offices) that can deal completely with something so personal or malleable. It’s about many things, including age and changing attitudes.

Older women grow nervous, writes Janice Turner in the Times (as she looks at some of the earlier crop of allegations) “because it is mob justice, hearsay that is impossible for a wronged man to refute; it conflates a genuine abuse with a clumsy pass; we fear the backlash will be hideous when it comes”. Sarah Vine in the Mail, aka Mrs Michael Gove, sees “a hysterical Westminster witch hunt” – “if this is what a world run by women looks like, count me out”.

But both Turner and Vine remember the Julia Hartley-Brewer age, decades back, when finding a Fallon hand on your knee was “mildly amusing”. No one, though, should expect the remotest consensus today.

Take that “witch hunt” line, says Suzanne Moore in the Guardian. “Any woman who does not want to be groped has no sense of humour. So they had to run out of a hotel room while the man they work for pleasured himself? They should take it in their stride. Men are the victims here. Look at all the big names accused of stuff they don’t even remember doing. The poor, persecuted slimeballs.”

Tough, unrelenting stuff. But also curiously insular in a Westminster sense. Harassment didn’t begin with Harvey Weinstein. In the States, this time around, it began with Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly at Fox News, many millions of hush payments ago. It began with Donald J Trump: “I moved on her and I failed. I’ll admit it … I did try and fuck her. She was married. And I moved on her very heavily … I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there.”

But Fox News is still America’s top cable news channel, and Donald is still president of the US, the most powerful man in the world. Little Britain and Little Westminster aren’t high on this scale of international ignominy (while the US berates Spacey and Hoffman). Who do we blame as our legislators squirm in a squall of dodgy dossiers? How does our media make sense of the furore?

There have been many good articles by women (some of them quoted above). There’s been very little from men. The BBC, which might have soft-pedalled issues like this in former times, has led the charge full throttle, maybe too eagerly at times. Social media, as usual, is a morass of names and lurid details: Westminster gossip turned digital. Print journalism, as usual, follows on behind, stuck with imperatives like accuracy, regulation and libel law.

But the basics of some kind of calm are pretty clear. Some rough agreement on the revised order. “Flirting great. Asking for dates great. Assault, harassment, groping, rape, not great. Some men need to learn the difference”, tweets Jenni Russell of the Times. Some gentler, respected way of handling and mediating cases. And some resolve to find peace in the gender wars. Oh! and some sense of perspective, too.

It’s only a year or so since the commissioner of the Metropolitan police apologised to the wife of Leon Brittan for an investigation turned rancid. It’s only a few months since Lord Macdonald, a former DPP, told the Times that the police inquiry into Ted Heath was a “tragicomedy of incompetence”. It’ll probably be only a minute or two more before we discover more holes in that dubious dossier.

This doesn’t invalidate the stream of sad testimony. But it is also crucial for all involved – including the media – that there is some sense of due process and due seriousness here in the weird new world of Tinder and tribulation. There need to be new lines in the sand after all this milling, lip-smacking distress. A life wasted on whatever side of the divide is still a life destroyed.