I guess the best-available defense to this sort of thing—lots of friendly emails and visits with someone recently convicted of procuring a child for the purposes of prostitution, I mean—is something like “He seemed to have lots of money and connections and I would have liked a little piece of that”

I think it’s obvious that the Me Too movement and the trial of Harvey Weinstein sparked an extreme McCarthyist response from a billionaire class that moved to buy and exert influence over media and democratic institutions, and I think that this manifested in several quite clear ways in Britain.