A genuinely handsome man, in my experience, is a truly rare and valuable thing. But as I dressed that summer night in London, three years ago, I was aware that the man I’d be seeing would not have been out of place amid the statues and paintings of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
A classically fashioned Englishman, with green flecked eyes and a profusion of fair hair that curled at the nape of his neck, he was someone I had hankered after for a decade.
He had been married, but was now divorced. I had not seen him for five years, and when he called me and suggested I come over to his house for dinner, I accepted.
Terrible trauma: But Petronella is determined she will not be silenced
I dressed carefully. My long-sleeved short dress was designed to show off my slender legs and distract attention from my arms, which are too long.
I enlarged my mouth into a Bardot pout with lip-liner, and artfully arranged my hair to tumble about my face.
I used every trick, as a trapper does to catch a hare, and my arrival at his house had the desired effect.
I could tell he was succumbing by the warmth in his eyes and the removal of a chilled bottle of champagne from the fridge.
On Wednesday night, I appeared on a debate on Channel 5, part of an all-female panel which would discuss #metoo, and its rights and wrongs
I half lay and half sat on a sofa, kicking off my shoes. He sat beside me, so that we were pressed together. We drank two glasses of champagne and then two or three more.
I could feel my inhibitions, or rather that inner voice which tells us when we are doing something foolish, receding.
The room was swimming when I put on a CD and we danced. We moved unsteadily, drank some more and danced again.
I do not remember who instigated the first kiss. To my surprise, I didn’t like it as much as I had expected. His breath was a little rancid and when I saw his face close up, there were red veins that had not been there before. Moreover, his once-luxuriant hair was receding.
But when he suggested we go upstairs to the bedroom, I didn’t demur. I wanted to lie down. I felt intolerably hot and tired.
He lay down beside me and the kissing began again. I was neither repelled nor interested. I longed, most of all, for sleep.
What happened next did him no credit. I had not been drugged because I had drugged myself – with alcohol. But he knew I was the worse for wear and there are unwritten rules about that sort of thing. Rules of chivalry.
I remember little until I woke up at three. He was still asleep, snoring. I dressed and tiptoed out of the house.
I hailed a taxi in the London dawn and when the driver pulled into my street, I caught sight of my face in the rear-view mirror. My make-up was smudged and my eyes were those of dying marsupial. Tears and fury vied for my emotions.
Some women, at this point, might have gone to the police or, more recently, joined the growing number who have made allegations via the controversial #metoo hashtag.
Doubtless some women would have viewed the actions of my date as a sexual assault or even rape. Did I have a grievance? Yes. I had not wanted him to go as far as he had. But I did not go to the police, nor did I tell a soul.
Instead, I looked at my own reflection and I flinched. I had led him on at every turn.
Should a man’s life be ruined because he had turned out to be unattractive, or because my drinking had made me unable to behave with any sense?
Petronella Wyatt faced abuse after suggesting it was unwise to mix heavy drinking with sex
I was not 18, I was a woman in my 40s. I knew, in my heart, that I bore some of the responsibility for what had taken place.
This is a deeply unfashionable view. In fact, as I found out this week, to express it in public is to risk being vilified, slandered and abused to the point of breaking.
Worse, it is my own sex at the forefront of this gathering mob, cheering like Madame Defarges as the heads of their victims – of both sexes – tumble from their shoulders.
On Wednesday night, I appeared on a debate on Channel 5, part of an all-female panel which would discuss #metoo, and its rights and wrongs. Or so I thought.
My section was entitled Blame And Shame. Let me say in advance that the audience had been told not to heckle, and to respect everyone’s views. Yet, as it turned out, I was the one who would be blamed and shamed. I have appeared on many TV panels, but never experienced such aggression, hatred and inhumanity.
The majority of the studio audience were female, young, and militant, who seemed to make little differentiation between a touch on the knee and the crime of rape.
There was a token young male who looked slightly dazed and who described himself as ‘reformed’. Like a character in The Manchurian Candidate, he denounced his own sex to the rowdy satisfaction of those watching.
I began by making the reasonable point that allegations of crime, including sexual crimes, are better made in a police station than on social media. The audience didn’t like it. When I went on to say that women should be aware of how they present themselves and that revealing clothes may well send out a sexual signal, they began to hiss, cat-call and boo.
I was momentarily stunned but, recovering myself, I suggested, drawing on my own experience, that it was unwise to mix heavy drinking with sex. The noise from the audience became something like an animal roar. I could hear the sound of fast approaching tumbrils.
Even as I left the studio, the heckling and abuse continued. I was lucky a kindly producer found a car to take me home, and once there I poured myself a large vodka, my hand shaking, believing the ordeal was at an end.
When I woke the following morning, however, it was to internet headlines and comments normally reserved for serial killers. I was ‘Vile Petronella Wyatt’, according to one national newspaper website. Others traduced me, too, with one wrongly claiming I had said that some women were ‘asking for it’.
Tweets were published about me that made me glad that my father was not alive to read them. All were defamatory, many made false claims about my personal life, and some were X-rated. And here is a significant and worrying thing: the majority of these threatening, bullying tweets were composed by women, enraged because I had stepped out of line. The abuse continues, still.
The predominant view in the TV studio was that all powerful men, including MPs, were by nature vicious predators. Politicians, it was claimed, felt ‘entitled’ to do with women what they pleased.
My blood is still boiling. My late father, Woodrow Wyatt, was a Labour MP who then sat in the House of Lords. If anything, he had been a victim of women.
Born in 1917, he married a fellow Oxford undergraduate and then fought in the Second World War. While he was away, his wife left him for a pacifist.
His second wife was the daughter of a Soviet Red Army officer who used to execute White Russian generals. My father had to be taken to hospital after she threw a frozen leg of lamb at his head.
He was scared of his third wife and terrified of his fourth, my mother, who is Hungarian.
From an early age. I was introduced to my father’s male friends, including Rupert Murdoch, Kingsley Amis, Peter Ustinov and numerous politicians, among them John Major, Douglas Hurd and Norman Lamont. Not once did any of them say or do anything inappropriate or intimidating in my presence.
And it was not, I am ashamed to say, for want of my trying.
Young women are sometimes manipulative and the challenge of having a famous man in thrall can be irresistible. On family holidays, I paraded before them in hot pants and revealing bikinis.
Sometimes it worked. They blushed and agreed to do things for me. Kingsley Amis helped me with my homework, and much later Douglas Hurd agreed to arrange for a plaque to be erected outside the London house of my political hero, Sir Robert Peel.
As a young journalist I was with politicians frequently. I attended Tory and Labour party conferences. Occasionally an MP would make a fruity remark or invite me to his hotel room for a drink, but on the only occasion I was seriously bothered, I had, in part, brought it on myself. I used to pick out short skirts for dinners with politicians I wished to impress, or whom I was interviewing. Men are simple creatures and they generally became more expansive.
On one occasion, I paired a short skirt with fishnet stockings and boots. The Tory MP in question, who resembled something on a fishmonger’s slab, couldn’t believe his luck.
We were dining in a seafood restaurant in Brighton, where the conference was being held. Once again, I over-imbibed. I told the poor man he was brilliant, dashing, talented. I complimented him on his horrible tie, which was polyester and as limp as something on a washing line. He then placed his hand on my thigh. I moved my leg, pretending not to notice.
When he asked me back to his room for a nightcap, I refused, rather rudely. He was confused and upset. He called me a tease.
After I returned to my own room, he kept calling me on the phone. I was annoyed, not because I was scared for my safety, but because he had become lachrymose. My conscience was pricked and for that reason I began to loathe him.
At this point, I must reiterate that I decry rape or sex assaults of any sort. They are unforgivable.
But I have sometimes observed female colleagues behaving in a way that would put Messalina – the sexually voracious wife of the emperor Claudius – to shame.
As for myself, I have few complaints against men. Naturally, I find it mildly unpleasant if a man shouts something lewd on the street, and no one cheers when the peony-faced office bore tells another dirty joke.
But these are more a symptom of bad manners and immaturity. British women, moreover, have never been drinking more.
According to the police, there is a direct correlation between rape and alcoholic intake.
Excessive drinking makes women vulnerable – not only to unwanted advances, but to all sorts of unpleasant occurrences, and not least to their health.
Doctors have always maintained that men’s bodies can tolerate alcohol better than women’s.
But even saying this angers the apostles of the new religion, which is based on the fallacy that men and women are the same.
Science has been subsumed by the simian gabble of the internet, which is no longer considered gabble but wisdom of an occult and superior sort.
The bilge of this new and intolerant religion is running through the veins of our society, as I discovered when I took my seat before the assembled studio audience. Democracy is founded on free speech. If chains are put on our tongues and our minds, we take a step towards tyranny. But there is a new, young elite who cannot tolerate the expression of any opinion that is contrary to their own.
All my life, I have managed to cope with any unpleasantness from men and, as someone who was brought up to take responsibility for her mistakes, I took equal responsibility for that date which turned so sour.
Now I know how it feels to be the victim of something even worse: a witch-hunt that is not constrained by any law or any sense of decency.
I cannot laugh this one off and I will not be silenced – not just for my sake, but for others who wish to tell an unpopular truth.
Nothing a man has ever done to me was as traumatic as what a largely female studio audience did last week.