I smell a rat when it comes to Harvey Weinstein. Let’s take it from the start. The telephone rang very early in the morning and a woman’s voice told me that Harvey Weinstein wanted to speak to me. I was put on hold. I waited. And waited, and then waited some more. The reason I didn’t hang up was that I wanted to tell Harvey that if Queen Elizabeth had made me wait as long as he had I would have hung up. ‘But for you, Sir Harvey, I’ll wait an eternity.’

Well, Harvey is a Commander of the British Empire but I upgraded him a notch because, as strange as it may sound, he and I are buddies. Harvey’s a committed lefty, Hillary’s pal, and he thinks that the Germans were all bad 70 years ago (he’s totally and catastrophically wrong on all counts). But I really like him. He comes to my parties and I go to his. Last Christmas, at my New York bash, I introduced Harvey to around 20 women, and he hit on all of them. Good for him.

His former lawyer Lisa Bloom was also on the telephone and asked me if I could confirm the details of a meeting between Harvey and a pretty assistant of his who had testified against him in a sexual-harassment lawsuit. Michael Mailer and I had been present because Harvey was interested in Nothing to Declare, the greatest prison book ever, written by one Taki. (It was published 27 years ago, about an event that took place 35 years ago.) The assistant kept Michael and me company while we waited for her boss, and once he had joined us and apologised for being late I said that his assistant had been extremely pleasant company because, unlike him, she was great-looking. ‘And she is very good at her job,’ added Harvey; the point of the story being that if anyone had suggested anything it was me, when I complimented her on her looks.

In America today, this could get you ten years in the pokey. The S- and R-words are what the J-word was in Berlin circa 1935. Juden has been replaced by ‘sexist’ and ‘racist’. It is Nineteen Eighty-Four again. In Harvey’s case, there is a lot to hang him with, and now that it’s out in the open, they are all creeping out of the woodwork. Even an ugly waitress has suddenly recalled that she served the ‘pig’ while he hit on women. It’s funny how feelings of anxiety and degradation suddenly appear when these kinds of revelations hit the papers. What I’d like to know is why it’s taken some 20 years, and others ten years, to come out with it. One of them, Rose McGowan, got 100,000 big ones for fending Harvey off at Sundance back in 1997, but then she spills the beans to the New York Times, which plasters it on its front page three days running. A Times columnist, a real phoney called Rutenberg, describes Harvey’s shenanigans as stomach-turning; others at the Times can hardly hide their glee at his demise. (Rutenberg writes how ghastly it was when Harvey grabbed hack Andrew Goldman in a headlock and dragged him out of a party 17 years ago. I applaud him for it. Hacks think they have a right to annoy and interfere and then lie, so Harvey did the manly thing.)

What troubles me is that the Times had a plan to destroy Weinstein, not because of what he was doing — which was long ago — but because it had destroyed the careers of two Christian conservatives, Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly, and now it was time for virtue-signalling; time to destroy a lefty Jew. He was not given time to defend himself. He was sacked from the Weinstein Company, his person reviled, his reputation reduced to worse than zero. Politicians are scrambling to give his donations to women’s charities, his board of governors has collapsed as three moneybags have cut and run, and Harvey is now as popular in LalaLand as one Adolf Schicklgruber.

The Weinstein Company without Harvey is non-existent. He’s the one that cheerleads the product and wins academy awards. A boutique studio will not survive without him. The Times is hinting that Harvey should be tried and that his future depends on therapy. The idea that a paper that lies as regularly and as egregiously as the New York Times is now the decider of the fate of a man like Harvey, who came from absolutely nothing, is horrible. Yes, he has acted appallingly; yes, he has bullied women; yes, he has stripped and asked them to watch him in the shower; yes, he has suggested ad nauseam that they get into bed with him. But he has not been found guilty of any crime and denies the allegations. There are professional athletes in America who beat up and rape women but the Times turns a blind eye, as do others.

Ashley Judd, who I’d give anything to go to bed with, should be ashamed of herself. She waited 20 years to join the rabble. She said no to Weinstein, so why stick the knife in now?