How hard is it to agree with somebody whose other beliefs and actions you find utterly repellent? Answer: extremely. Yet it is a mark of civilisation that we separate our feelings about a person from the point they’re making. ‘I hate you therefore you’re wrong about gravity’ would be quite a dangerous position to hold standing by an open window on the 27th floor…

This week therefore I admit agreeing with both Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and hang ’em ’n’ flog ’em right-wing Brexit-loving commentator Julia Hartley Brewer. This is not a happy place to be. Also, is it dangerous? If I like a tweet by Putin will I end up on a watch list?

Judging the person not their action is a systemic flaw in our society. Who remembers the ‘fragrant lady’? In 1987 MP Jeffrey Archer attempted a libel action against the Daily Star after claims he’d paid a prostitute. The bewigged, bothered and bewildering judge bizarrely declared it was impossible Archer had done anything so lewd because he’d been athletic at Oxford and had really rather a smashing and fragrant wife in the form of Mary Archer described then and ever after as ‘the fragrant lady’. How she must hate that! These days any celeb with a few brain cells would have rushed out a perfume. What could Mary Archer have named it had she done that? ‘Denial’ maybe. ‘Betrayal’ or more accurately ‘Forever Loyal.’ If I were doing her branding ‘Poisoned’ feels a bit edgier although that one sounds familiar.

Is a crime less awful if committed by somebody who has stacked up a lot of community work, rowed for Oxford or served in the armed forces? Judges certainly seem to rely a great deal on ‘character’. And frankly that attitude sucks.

A damaging action is not less injurious to the victim if the offending person is only doing it on one of their ‘off days’ from being a pillar of the community. If a criminal said ‘give me a lighter sentence – I’ve got Grade 8 piano’ I hope there would be contemptuous mirth from the bench. Yet a judge will incline their head and agree when a golfer says, I deliver meals on wheels, m’lud, that moment when I took a screwdriver to my girlfriend’s head was totally out of character – it’s just she said she was leaving me and I couldn’t help myself after all the pints of wine she’d made me drink.

30 years after Mary Archer became forever scented in our psyches, our judges still seem to think a solid sort of fellow can’t be guilty in the way a desperate out of work glue-sniffing teenager must be. So perhaps not surprisingly a prejudiced attitude seeps through all layers of society which diagnoses the guilty as ‘one of us’ or ‘one of them’ before declaring the sentence.

More women are getting assaulted and murdered. It’s complex but one factor is our increasingly prejudiced and misogynistic society.

Have a guess which century this was written: ‘The upshot is there is very considerable mitigation available to you and it is right somebody of your position should be able to call upon, not just his good character, but his impeccable character. I am going to discount significantly the sentence that might well be appropriate here.’

No, not the 1800s or the 1900s. This was 2017 when the late Judge Graham Cottle said former Conservative Councillor Douglas Hellier Laing had caused a ‘very, very unpleasant set of injuries’ (when he beat his wife with a mallet) but the offence was ‘totally out of character’.

Mrs Hellier-Laing sustained several wounds, one of which was ‘pulsing with blood’, the court heard. She is reported saying: ‘I keep seeing his expressionless face as he’s hitting me.’

Here though is what really piqued the male judge’s pity: ‘It is a very sad case indeed. You (Hellier Laing) should be starting old age with friends and in the community but you are going to be starting it in prison.’

Women scream and the men who attack them are praised. Please join my campaign to challenge prejudice and condemn all acts of physical assault. There is no time to waste. For more info [email protected]