Ulrika and 'The Charmer':

Some say the mystery is how a certain television presenter managed to get away with abusing women for so long. Some say the mystery is why his career should be in ruins when his only trial has been by media. And some say it is a mystery why we care at all. Cole Moreton looks behind the headlines

Why do we care? That question is easy to answer, at least in nervous newsrooms and agitated editing suites. The newspapers and broadcasters who chose to name the man accused of raping Ulrika Jonsson last week are now very stressed-out indeed, as a conversation between two TV reporters on Friday revealed. One of them was asked why his station's main crime expert was not at an important trial.

"He's gone off to look for meat," was the answer. "We need some meat to save us if yer man decides to sue. We've got no evidence, but we named him. So they've got every available body off squirrelling around."

That's not how it is supposed to work, of course. You're supposed to find evidence that somebody has done something wrong before you accuse him in print, particularly if the crime carries a prison sentence. But when a fellow television presenter blurted out the man's name live on air, apparently by accident, many editors decided it was open season

They gambled on the man confessing, or at least making a denial that would retrospectively justify their splashing his name and face all over the place. But so far he has said nothing, preferring to go off air and disappear.

They gambled on the police arresting him, or at least taking quick and firm action in response to another woman who has come forward with claims that she too was raped. But so far Scotland Yard has only suggested he might like to give an interview voluntarily. They gambled on Ulrika Jonsson herself naming him, but so far she refuses to say any more about the assailant she nicknamed the Charmer. So there it is. Acres of newsprint and hours of air time identifying a man as a rapist, and barely a shred of evidence. "If the police don't do anything he can take us to the cleaners," said the reporter on Friday. That might not be entirely true; the man might consider it too much of an ordeal to go through a lengthy libel case. Even so, can it be right to convict a man – however odious he seems – before he has even been interviewed by the police?

This modern morality tale begins 14 years ago in a hotel room, where a 19-year-old trainee weather girl is or isn't raped by a fellow aspirant presenter – then it leaps forward to a fortnight ago. Since then not a day has passed without Ulrika or the Charmer making the headlines.

SVEN AND ME: THE TRUTH

The Daily Mail kicked it all off on 12 October by running a teaser for the next day's serialisation of the Ulrika autobiography, Honest, for which Associated Newspapers had paid around £700,000. The England football manager Sven-Goran Eriksson was in Slovakia for a match, trying to ignore speculation he might quit if the revelations by his fellow Swede were really damaging. That night Ulrika fronted a one-off makeover show on ITV1 called How Do I Look?.

SVEN USED JOB AS COVER FOR AFFAIR

The following day's extracts were high in romantic content but contained nothing to threaten Eriksson's job. He hadn't abused his position ("Sven's Volvo is his own") or said anything indiscreet about his players. The News of the World was easily distracted by Ulrika's brief fling with a prince: "Edward and I did everything but have sex". That night she appeared as a panellist on the BBC Choice show Shooting Stars.

RHINO: I BEDDED HORNY ULRIKA

By Wednesday 16 October it was all going wrong for Ulrika. Not only were the "revelations" far tamer than expected but they had only elicited sympathy for Eriksson. Some of Ulrika's peers had even jeered at her at the National Television Awards on Tuesday but she said, "Je ne regrette rien." The Sun scraped the bottom of the tabloid barrel with its "exclusive" that she had slept with a minor combatant in the long-defunct series Gladiators. Meanwhile the Charmer was talking about Ulrika's book on TV. Kiss and tell was "something I would never do".

THE DAY I WAS RAPED

Suddenly on Thursday everything changed. The Mail carried quotes from a television documentary to be shown that night on Channel 4 in which Ulrika described being raped. "I became quite ill for a period after that, I guess because I was quite badly bruised inside and ended up in hospital for five days." Asked why she did not go to the police she said, "I genuinely felt it would be my word against his. And I think, you know, I felt ashamed." As The Trouble With Men was broadcast the Charmer was at a party in central London, before going on to a lap-dancing club.

SVEN'S ONLY HALF A LOVER

The Sun got it spectacularly wrong on the Saturday, focusing on a joke Ulrika had made about Sven on Jonathan Ross's BBC1 show the previous night. The real story was how Ross had pressed her to reveal the alleged rapist's identity. In front of a camera manned by her former husband John Turnbull he said: "It was a presenter wasn't it?" She nodded: "But you're not going to name him are you?" No, said Ross. "It's for you to say."

Watching at home on television, a 30-year-old office worker recognised the story, turned to her mother and said, "That's the man who did it to me."

ULRIKA PORN VIDEO SHOCK

The News of the World on the Sunday said a lawyer working for Ulrika's former boyfriend, the ex-footballer Stan Collymore, had been trying to sell an explicit video of the two having sex, filmed on holiday in Jamaica. The newspaper turned it down.

As speculation about the identity of the alleged rapist grew, The Mail on Sunday asked the Charmer if it was him. "I have absolutely no comment." Ulrika asked reporters at the gate of her home to "leave her alone".

I'LL NEVER NAME DATE RAPIST

The next day she was on GMTV reinforcing the headline in The Sun. "I never revealed his identity because I feel very strongly that if I should have done something about it, I should have done it when I was 19."

The publicist Max Clifford also appeared on television that day, talking about Ulrika. The Charmer was asking the questions. Off-camera he asked for help. "I'm in a minefield. You're the PR expert, get me out of it."

Having thought about it over the weekend the 30-year-old woman walked into a police station and said she too had been raped by the man, in 1998.

I DIDN'T RAPE ULRIKA

Nobody was naming the Charmer on Tuesday 22 October but he talked to the tabloids through a friend, passing on the message that he knew was a bit of a ladies' man but had never committed rape. Clifford also admitted a conversation "on the phone", saying he had told him, "'No comment' doesn't sound very good at all. From a PR perspective it sounds like an admission of guilt."

TV 'RAPIST': TWO MORE COMPLAIN

With Clifford by his side, the television host Matthew Wright named the Charmer on air, apparently accidentally. Wright apologised afterwards and said the person he had mentioned was not the one. Soon afterwards the Charmer appeared on television, looking agitated.

Ulrika promoted her book with an appearance on Radio 4. Later she was granted an injunction to stop Stan Collymore from selling his video. That night she presented Mr Right, in which 15 women compete to date one male.

ULRIKA RAPE MAN REVEALED

The next day the Mail devoted five pages to the "worrying appetites" of the Charmer, whose picture it published. The Sun gave him five pages, alleging "11 victims", although their tales seemed more about consensual sex than rape. Other newspapers, including The Independent, chose not to name him.

The Charmer was due on screen that day but failed to appear. His co-host apologised. "He has asked me to tell you he is having a few days off because he has got things to sort out." Despite 1,000 supportive emails the Charmer was put on indefinite leave. The Serious Crime Group had begun inquiries into the 30-year-old woman's complaint.

Ulrika appeared at a club in Chelsea that night for a long-planned party to "launch" her book. She posed for pictures but would not comment on the naming of the Charmer. "I'm not talking about it."

The following day Ulrika was knocked off the front pages by other news. The suspense was gone – and it had been that which made us care. Public attention had been arrested in the days before the Charmer was named, when every viewer could speculate which of the friendly men on their box was a secret rapist. Now many of those who had been caught up in the tale felt revulsion, but they also felt, as the psychologists would say, closure. Unfortunately it is not all over yet. There is a chance that the Charmer might be telling his story in a tabloid today, for quite a bit of money. If he isn't, and the police do not bring charges, and the frantic digging by hacks produces nothing, the final chapter of this sorry story may well be played out in court.

My terrible verruca, those awful men and my good friend Angus

By D J Taylor

The celebrity confessional is as old as the cuneiform alphabet. The Victorian bestseller lists were full of discreet "kiss 'n' tell" memoirs. A hundred years ago Dickens's daughter Kate and Thackeray's daughter Annie were righteously affronted by some modest revelations about their fathers' amours. Refined and embellished over the succeeding century the genre has become as stylised and as artificial a literary form as, say, the sonnet or the haiku, awash with bewildering protocols and procedural givens. What now emerges from this bright, primary colour world is invariably a kind of living cartoon, an extrapolation of the TV soap except that it happens to be inhabited by real people.

The following is excerpted from 'Possibly: My Life in Hollywood, TV and Downing Street' by Heidi Golightly, as told to D J Taylor (Muckraker Press, £19.99)

A journalist once told me that I "exuded self-confidence". Naturally I was flattered – who wouldn't be? – but later, during one of the tumultuous late-night trysts that I would share in a palm-fronded ocean hideaway with a blond beefcake who was briefly guitar roadie to celebrated rock star Keith Richards – I thought to myself "Hey Mr Journalist, you don't know me at all". Basically I'm a really shy, insecure person – if I weren't one of Britain's best-loved TV personalities, with all the responsibility that entails, I'd be quite happy just being an ordinary housewife or call-centre assistant or something. Anyway, I decided to write this book as a way of exploring some of the experiences that have made me what I am, and also to explain to the man in my life – little Moomin – why it was that mummy was sometimes in tears on the sofa when he wanted to introduce me to the new au pair.

As to my own early life, one of the first things I can remember is the water lapping against the hull of my father's houseboat in that soft, gentle, lapping way it had. People tell me that I was a centred, bubbly, happy little girl – I tried asking daddy about this the last time he rang up wanting money – but, you know, life wasn't all candy! Tragically, the night before the first tap-dancing competition that my parents had entered me for I discovered a verruca on my left heel. Even now I can remember the trauma of that terrible day, but my wonderful friend Coco, whose relationship with the cousin of well-known politician Geoffrey Howe's last but one parliamentary secretary I have promised not to divulge, says that we all need these set-backs now and again in life to make us strong, and I agree...

And before too long I would get my first big break! Sipping a cold, cold beer as I lounged between the expensive sheets of a Mayfair hotel bed, where I had just enjoyed my seventh orgasm with a Manchester United youth team player, I heard the telephone ring. My life has been full of strange coincidences – my wonderful friend Barathea once said to me "Heidi, your life is full of strange coincidences" – it turned out to be the man who has proved my oldest and sincerest friend in television, Bruce Pompadour, offering me the chance to front TV-am's hottest new show, You and Your Gerbil. Naturally I jumped at the chance, although, sadly, it meant saying goodbye to "Wolfie", who later expressed his displeasure by setting fire to my luxury penthouse apartment and smashing my collection of Wade's Whimsies. Charming, I must say!

Fortunately my wonderful friend Angus Deayton was on hand to whisk me away for a charming week in his fabulous Tuscan villa, with a crowd of hilarious, kind and supportive media people. Angus gave me just the kind of hard-nosed advice I needed. "The thing is, Cindy," he said – I was always touched that he called me by a pet name – "that you ought to let your spirit run free. And we'd really like it if you could do the washing up."

You and Your Gerbil was a very centring and humbling, experience, which led to many changes in my life, among them a high-profile job as assistant astrology correspondent on TV Quick. But shall I tell you something? Those "celebrities" that I mixed with, Noel and Liam and Anthea and the Chuckle Brothers, turned out to be quite ordinary people, people that you could enjoy a laugh and a chat with if they were sitting next to you on Concorde or somewhere. Not many people know, for instance, that my great friend Sarah Ferguson has a really mischievous sense of humour. I was once standing in the cloakroom at London's prestigious Hilton Hotel, shortly after enjoying oral sex with Bruce Willis'schauffeur, when she asked me: "The Aquascutum coat with the blue lapels please." I simply roared, but she went on: "And make sure the scarf hasn't fallen out of the pocket."

And then, tragically, it all went wrong. You and Your Gerbil getting axed! The highly publicised break-up of my relationships with Mr A, Mr B and Mr C, all of which I now deeply regret! If it hadn't been for tiny Moomin, creeping into the kitchen each night to wrest the vodka bottle out of my hand and ask "Are you my mummy?" I think I should have given up TV altogether. It was a very centring and humbling experience which has convinced me that, really, world peace is the number one issue on my agenda... (continues)