WE knew. Or at least quite a lot of us already thought we knew the name of the unnamed businessman hiding behind last week’s super injunction before it was revealed – and it was Sir Philip Green.

That many of us had already speculated that he was the man who was seeking to silence allegations of sexual harassment and racist abuse long before Peter Hain used his parliamentary privilege to drop his bomb in the House of Lords says a great deal.

The people doing bad things are rarely the unexpected ones. They’re hiding in plain sight, working the system with a flagrant entitlement.

Over the past few years, Green, the Arcadia boss who, following the collapse of BHS, has been dubbed by MPs the “unacceptable face of capitalism”. There was, for instance, the fact that he extracted large sums from BHS during the time he owned it and left it on “life support”. Then there was the fact that his businesses are owned by his wife, who lives in the tax haven of Monaco. Or that when, last year, he did agree to hand over £363 million in cash to help plug the pension deficit left in the wake of BHS’s collapse, it seemed with utmost reluctance.

So, when last week, following his naming, there were calls for a boycott of Topshop, one of the stores run by Arcadia, and demands for Green to be stripped of his knighthood, my first feeling was to wonder why this didn’t happen long ago. How is it that someone like Green could even get a knighthood in the first place, let alone manage to keep hold of it? And why hadn’t we, since the BHS debacle, hounded him down?

One of the reasons for this is that for all our outrage at the workings of the super-rich, for the most part we’re at a loss as to what to do about it. The wealthy and their money, hived off in tax havens and shell companies, seem so beyond the reach of our democratic institutions that we throw up our hands in despair.

But sexual harassment allegations and the #MeToo movement represent something different. They tap into a different anger – our fury at an abuse of power that is physical and intimate – and, since they channel the difficult feelings that exist around sex, trigger a different type of mob outrage. Wealthy men, I suspect, are more vulnerable to this embarrassment than they are to being shamed for the fly ways they’ve played the tax or financial system.

That’s presumably why Philip Green bothered to spend half a million on this now pointless injunction. Green has since denied any “unlawful sexual or racist behaviour”.

This injunction is part of a pattern of behaviour not uncommon among the super wealthy.

It’s just one of the many ways in which Green has worked the rules. This recent scandal involves his use of non-disclosure agreements to get some women employees to keep quiet. These are, if you like, a kind of legal loophole – for the NDA was really created to protect trade secrets, not bosses’ reputations – and that’s not so very different from finding a legal tax loophole and using it. It’s just one way in which the rich play the system.

When we look at it that way, it becomes clearer why #MeToo matters so much – not just because we need to create safer environments for women, but because the movement connects to the wider drive towards making those who live beyond the rules accountable. It is part of that question of how we create a proper functioning democracy.

As yet we are far from finding the answer. But there are obvious changes we can make. Yes, we can boycott Topshop. Yes, we can close down the use of NDAs to silence victims. And yes, we can campaign to have a knighthood taken away from someone who never should have got it in the first place.

THE biggest outrage on Scottish social media this week seemed to be a photo of a woman with a dead goat – a hunter, called Larisa Switlyk, holding the wild animal that she had just shot on Islay. I don’t want to be too flippant about this because actually I found the image quite shocking myself, such that it gave me pause for thought about my meat-eating habits. But at the same time, given that people have been shooting things across Scotland for many years, you have to wonder why her? Why, given that each year brings hunters posting similar Scottish trophy shots on social media, did she get the hate? Well, one reason is that she doesn’t look like your regular Scottish shooting type – which, frankly, is the white, wealthy male. That type so dominates the demographic of who kills animals that we barely notice them doing it. But, with Switlyk there was almost a shock-of-the-new effect, not just because she’s good looking and wearing camouflage, not tweeds, but also because her kill is not a deer, but, unusually, a rather beautiful goat. Women aren’t supposed to kill things – and they certainly aren’t, as she did, supposed to describe it as “fun”. For this reason, though I’ve long loathed blood sports, I’m reluctant to join the mob laying into her.