We’ll never be able to stamp out sleaze at Westminster – isn’t that depressing?

We cannot feasibly get rid of every single male politician – there are no background checks thorough enough to ensure that everyone who comes into parliament is safe and decent, writes Marie Le Conte

We ran towards the ball and we gave it our all. Of course, the ball was taken away from us, again (UK Parliament/AFP/Getty)

I’m exhausted. Are you exhausted? Honestly, I’m knackered. I am looking at my desk and I am wondering what it would feel like to hit my forehead against the cold hard wood, once, twice, enough times to knock myself out.

Earlier this year we went through a second round of MeToo – Me2? – in Westminster and we asked: have things changed since 2017? And the answer was, for the most part: not really, no. Things have not really changed. I wrote about it at the time, for this very newspaper. You can read it if you want. I’m not going through it again.

Anyway, we looked around and found that things were still broadly the same and broadly bad, and we channelled our inner Charlie Brown and decided to kick the ball again. We knew that the last time we’d tried to kick the ball it’d been taken away from us and we’d looked silly, but that didn’t matter.