WHEN I first heard reports that Holyrood was a hotbed of sexual harassment, I thought it must be a joke in bad taste. They meant Hollywood, surely. But as the Sunday Herald reported, the human rights lawyer Aamer Anwar claims he has documentary proof of sexual harassment, bullying and even sexual assault in the Scottish Parliament. He described it as a “ticking time bomb”. Well, it’s just gone off.

Let’s be clear: sexual assault is effectively rape by another name and involves a coercive sexual act. Harassment is behaviour, not exclusively of a sexual nature, that is threatening, degrading, and intimidating. We’re talking about things like stalking, verbal assault, sexual bribery, bullying. This is not some sleazy MP putting his hand on a journalist’s knee 15 years ago, but actual, current sexual abuse. If the allegations are true, people in Holyrood could be going to prison, either for sexual crimes or perhaps for covering them up. I’m sure, Mr Anwar, an experienced lawyer, wouldn’t fabricate any of this. Until his evidence is fully investigated it will form a dark cloud over Scotland’s parliament.

The time for hearsay and rumour about all this is over. Yesterday’s soothing homilies from the Deputy First Minister, John Swinney, reassured no one. Anonymous telephone lines, secret dossiers and WhatsApp lists are no longer enough either. The public has a right to know exactly what has been going on in an institution that they pay for and where they expect conduct to be above suspicion. If MSPs or officials really have been abusing their office by harassing and assaulting their staff then it has to be examined in the open.

I am desperately sorry for the women – and possibly men – who have been victims of this culture of abuse, if such it is. And of course it is difficult for them to come forward. But until people start naming names, parliamentary predators will continue to hide in the fog of confusion and euphemisms about “sex pests”. No one in 2017 has to put up with sexual harassment at work, or bullying – or indeed cronyism and favouritism, which often ride shotgun to sexual harassment. Victims of sexual assault can be assured of anonymity. The days are long gone when women, or young gay men, were dismissed as having asked for it.

This is a real crisis for the Scottish Parliament, which is supposed to be a safe space. Unlike the Palace of Westminster – which, as I remember it from working there, was much more like an old fashioned gentleman’s club, complete with a primitive attitude to women, who were mostly regarded as ornamentation. I was in the Westminster lobby 20 years ago when the “Back to Basics” scandal broke, revealling all manner of sordid sexual activities among elected members. It’s not hard to imagine sexual harassment continuing to thrive in Westminster, though I have to say I never actually witnessed it.

But the Scottish Parliament was supposed to be different. It grew out of a civic movement and prided itself on being everything that Westminster is not. There is no late-night drinking culture in Holyrood as there was in Westminster. No lobby system to manage and launder Parliament’s image to the world. The family-friendly, gender-conscious culture of Holyrood is supposed to be open and transparent; the very building was designed to avoid dark corners. You just need to read the Scottish Parliament’s morally high-sounding Diversity and Inclusion Strategy to realise the apparent depths of institutional hypocrisy.

I say apparent because, while this scandal has been running for days we still have no clarity on exactly what has been going on – in either parliament. The Anwar allegation is that Holyrood is harbouring, not just “handsy” lurchers, but actual sex criminals, who’ve been shielded behind Holyrood’s politically-correct public relations machine. The Scottish National Party is the main culprit, we are told, which may be less to do with its politics and more to do with the fact that there are more SNP MSPs than all the Unionist parties combined. One of the problems in getting to the bottom of this scandal is that politicians can’t resist using rumour and gossip as weapons in their own party political culture wars. In Westminster, they hurl them across the chamber in a game of mutually assured defamation.

In this climate of suspicion, the presumption of innocence is in danger of being abandoned, and defamation is taking on a new meaning. In the present febrile atmosphere, the mere accusation of unspecified sexual impropriety may soon be enough to end a career. And it will be no use claiming that the accusation is libellous, or that trivial matters are being taken out of context, because people in public life risk being convicted in the court of public opinion merely by the fact of an allegation being made.

Indeed, there might be a role here for Google Glass – those slightly creepy video glasses that record everything you see, and which featured in dystopian sci-fi shows like Black Mirror. Now that sexual harassment allegations have rocked institutions all the way from Hollywood to Holyrood, we may soon see men in positions of authority electing to wear these devices, not just to protect them from wrongful accusations of sexual impropriety, but to make them think twice about making an approach that might be misinterpreted.

I can hardly believe I’m actually suggesting that relations between the sexes have become so fraught, so riven with mistrust, that people may have to put themselves under voluntary surveillance. But where will this end? Edwina Currie, who famously had an affair with John Major, is right to say we don’t want men or women in the workplace to be constantly under suspicion. Sex happens: around 20 per cent of us meet our future partners in the workplace. Nor do we want a culture where women are seen always as passive victims who need a chaperone every time they’re in male company. Most women can take care of themselves. But until there is some clarity on where the boundaries lie, and while genuine sexual harassment is going unpunished, we are all having a bad day at the office.