“Unless we ensure individuals are brought to justice, nothing will change,” Kate Maltby wrote in the Guardian in 2019. The latest comments about male colleagues’ “wandering hands” from the international trade secretary, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, combined with the fact that no fewer than 56 MPs are under investigation over sexual conduct, suggest that not only have things not changed for the better since Ms Maltby raised her own complaint in 2017, in some respects they may even have got worse.
True, some MPs have been held to account for inappropriate behaviour. Damian Green was sacked from his position as first secretary of state in 2017 after an investigation found that he had lied to parliament about pornography on his computer. No definitive conclusion was reached in relation to Ms Maltby’s claim that he had behaved wrongly towards her, although her account was found to be “plausible”. In 2020 the former Conservative MP Charlie Elphicke was sentenced to two years in jail for three sexual assaults – two of them on a parliamentary worker. Another Conservative MP, Imran Ahmad Khan, was this month found guilty of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy in 2008, while the Tory MP David Warburton has had the whip removed after allegations emerged of sexual harassment and cocaine use. Labour MP Liam Byrne also faces suspension from the Commons for non-sexual bullying of a male staffer.
