I’d kind of hoped, until recently, that Phillip Schofield would not trouble my consciousness in any big way again. I had vague memories of his grinning, chipmunk-like face getting up to antics with Gordon the Gopher in the 1990s. I noticed when he was in Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat, because that was all over the papers. Occasionally I’d see a clip of him on breakfast telly. And then there was the thing where he came out as gay – which seemed to merit an Alan Partridge shrug – and the thing with the Queen’s funeral, which, again, was hard to get worked up about. He seemed an entirely harmless and unimportant part of the furniture of the world, like KP Skips or National Conservatism: dandy if you like that sort of thing, quite optional if you don’t.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, it became impossible to escape him. Every newspaper had him on the front page with his grinning, chipmunk-like face. He was earnestly discussed on the radio. He was perma-trending on social media. He was leaving his job! He had some sort of feud with Holly Willoughby! Again: Alan Partridge shrug. Man stops being on telly programme; man doesn’t get on with colleague. Why was this such a big deal? Now, the whole sorry saga has come to a head and we discover why everyone was so excited. Everyone is cross with him because he had an affair and lied about it.

Was Schofield making sheep’s eyes at this lad when the boy was too young for him to legally do anything about it?

That will make us all think slightly the less of him – those of us who were thinking of him at all. But is non-stop national headlines, soul-searching and breast-beating at the broadcaster an appropriate and proportionate response? One line popular among the crazed wingnuts of social media is that the departure of Schofield from breakfast television is a scandal equivalent to the unmasking of Jimmy Savile. And look: noisome though we may all find Schofield, with his grinning, chipmunk-like face, having an affair with a man in his twenties and then fibbing to cover it up is not quite on the level of being a serial child rapist and suspected necrophile.

Rupert Everett has been a welcome and unexpected voice of common sense on all this. Asked about the matter in a recent telly interview, he said: ‘What’s he done, this person? He’s married and has had an affair. With someone it’s legal to have an affair with. Unless there’s something else that we haven’t heard about they should drop it. It’s outrageous, this kind of puritan fascism that’s going on.’ So, the interviewer followed up, sharp as a tack: ‘Do you think the coverage has been disproportionate, then?’ ‘It’s insane!” exclaimed Everett. “We’ve come to this point where we just want to scratch each-other’s eyes out. We’re like a pack of dogs in a dog park.’

Aha, comes the objection. Schofield was a very important telly presenter, and he had power over this young man whose career was just starting and which rested on his patronage. That is, of course, an issue of concern. I would suggest, though, that it is not an issue of national concern. There is something a bit icky about a person in a position of power cracking on to a subordinate in the workplace, no question. If it’s done persistently, when the answer is clearly no, that’s sexual harassment and it’s an abuse of power. It is, ideally, not done at all.

But we do not live in an ideal world, and it is done very often indeed. Many of us spent most of our daylight hours in an office. We are often expected and encouraged to socialise with our workmates, and office relationships – in which there is almost always some sort of implied or actual power differential – do take place. Sometimes they are regretted, and sometimes the power imbalance is involved in that regret, and sometimes they are not. The libido is an unruly thing. We haven’t yet proposed laws to forbid anyone from jumping into bed with their colleagues.

History is full of men who married their secretaries. Do we call T.S. Eliot a groomer because his second wife Valerie was 40 years younger than him and in a subordinate professional position? (She set her cap at him much more than he did at her, the record seems to suggest.) The power differential can, indeed, be involved in the attraction. Henry Kissinger’s old line that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac resonates. What about Emmanuel Macron? Was he groomed by his schoolteacher, now the French first lady? Or Madonna, who had a child by her personal trainer? The editor of the Guardian is in a relationship with one of her columnists. Does the power differential make it a professional sin? A personal one?

It is demented, not to mention prurient, to presume to judge a whole swathe of other people’s affairs, relationships, dalliances, passing fancies, random hook-ups and long and happy marriages on some public moral scale independent of the law of the land, and then airily decide who we feel entitled to put in the stocks. That really is what Everett called puritan fascism.

Was Schofield making sheep’s eyes at this lad when the boy was too young for him to legally do anything about it? Did he help him into the industry thinking that something romantic might in the longer run develop? We can imagine it as a possibility – and those calling him a ‘groomer’ clearly do. But we should have the humility to acknowledge that we don’t know, and that whatever goes on in anyone’s inner thoughts is their own concern.

Knowing someone as a child, and then starting a relationship with them, is a very different thing from starting a relationship with a child. My late uncle was a generation older than my aunt and knew her from her infancy: their affair when she was a young woman was a great family scandal, but it wasn’t against the law and it all worked out in a long and very happy marriage. Nobody is suggesting that the young man in this case was anything other than of age, and enthusiastic in his consent. Until we hear from the man concerned that Schofield threatened or bribed or bullied his way into bed with him, or that he made advances while he was under the age of consent, it’s a bloody cheek to presume otherwise.

The tricoteuses of social media and the tabloid front pages want to insinuate this is a borderline paedophilia thing, or a #MeToo sexual harassment thing. But until such time as evidence emerges of either thing, I think we should leave old Schofield alone so we call all get back to not thinking about him, and his grinning, chipmunk-like face, at all.