This time last week Daniel Korski was the favourite to become the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, with high profile supporters in the party and an impressive CV. Today he appears to be finished politically, dismissed by the tabloids and lodged in the public consciousness as ‘grope claim Tory’.
Korski’s fall from grace culminated with his relatively prompt decision to stand down within days of accusations that he touched the breast of TV writer Daisy Goodwin 10 years ago during a meeting in Downing Street.
Despite his trenchant denials that the incident ever took place, the story showed no signs of going away and the former special adviser to David Cameron acknowledged it was impossible to carry on with his mayoral ambitions.
He blamed ‘the troubling state of our political landscape’ for his fate, the ‘dirty tactics’ and ‘smear campaigns’ that have undermined him, and lamented that a denial means nothing in today’s world.
In that he is right. Some have argued that, in the absence of witnesses, it is his word against Goodwin’s. Others (the BBC’s Martha Kearney included) have challenged Goodwin’s memory after a decade: was she ‘absolutely certain’ events unfolded as she had described them?
Goodwin sounded absolutely certain to me. But should her allegation be enough to destroy a man’s career? Even if he did behave inappropriately, does that make him a bad person?
People can change, as the Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine wrote, shrugging off the wandering hand phenomenon with an anecdote of her own. What one woman sees as a sexual assault another might consider a bit of harmless fun.
Goodwin will have wrestled with these torments herself before deciding to name Korski earlier this week.
‘Could I have misinterpreted his action?’ she wrote in the Times on Monday. ‘I have thought about this a lot, but the answer is always no. He, like some other men in power, must be the sort of man who gets a kick out of surprising women in this way.’
She had referred to the Downing Street episode before without identifying the culprit but said she could no longer keep quiet now that he was running for public office.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think she would have invited the media glare and subsequent victim blaming from some quarters if she hadn’t felt the charge was justified.
She has, belatedly, made a formal complaint to the Cabinet Office and said she is calling him out because ‘if this is a pattern of behaviour then the people of London deserve to know’.
One of the main thrusts of Korski’s mayoral campaign was to make the streets of London safer for women. Goodwin said this made her ‘queasy’, knowing that a man ‘who clearly got a thrill out of groping me under a portrait of Mrs Thatcher, should be someone who can be relied on to make judgment calls about how to protect the opposite sex’.
Korski, for all his protestations of innocence, did not help himself with his opaque comments about his marriage. When asked on TalkTV if he had always been faithful to his wife, he said: ‘I have a fantastic marriage to my wife. And I’m really, you know, excited that we’ve built a fantastic family together.’
That sounds like a ‘no’. But if marital infidelity alone debarred one from politics the talent pool would shrink further.
More telling is the pausing of support in the Conservative Party for Korski as soon as the allegations were aired, with the people who knew him best appearing to sow doubts about his character.
Then Goodwin said three other women had come forward with sexual harassment and ‘inappropriate touching’ claims against Korski.
He may well feel he has been unfairly treated but if he had a real understanding of the prejudices women still confront in the workplace – and in getting to and from the workplace – he would see why any man facing questions about his sexual probity is considered a risk.
Women must walk a gauntlet daily of unwelcome approaches from strangers – lewd comments cast from a car window, relentless staring on the Tube, stalking if they’re very unlucky – before they even get to work.
My daughter counted six such encounters in a 20-minute walk from London Bridge to Waterloo the other day. In the office, she has been manhandled in the lift, warned of at least two creeps to avoid, and, at 22, has learnt to be desensitised to sexist remarks, as it seems have her female colleagues and friends, many with similar tales.
Not much has changed since the 1980s when women of my – and Goodwin’s – generation began our working lives. The physical affronts aside, there remains an element of not being taken seriously, of being afforded less respect than your male peers, and of grievances, should you dare to raise them, being ignored.
To preside over and try to address a culture that, post #MeToo, continues to demean women, the mayor, or any figure with such responsibility, needs to be beyond reproach in his own conduct with women.
That may sound like a big ask to some people but not, I expect, to the majority of women in the capital.
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