Evening Standard comment: Finding Weinstein guilty is a vital win for #MeToo | Labour’s endless contest | Yorkshire Tea by tweet

Most criminal cases affect only those directly involved — the accused, their victims and perhaps their families. A few are different. They define their age. They shape how people behave. They reveal what society thinks is right and wrong.

The trial of Harvey Weinstein — the all-present, all-powerful Hollywood producer whose abuse of women has just led to his conviction in a New York court for sex crimes including rape — is one of those whose impact will last long after his sentence is announced next month.

It marks the moment that the #MeToo movement won the backing of the law.

Once, someone like Weinstein would never have found himself in court. He’d have got away with excuses: that the women who reported his crimes did not break off contact with him immediately, or come forward at the start.

He’d have used his power and his connections to hide his behaviour, or downplay it as normal. And, if that had failed, he would have used top lawyers to crush his accusers — and he tried to do all this.

The difference is that this time he failed.

Justice was done: the court found him not guilty of the most serious charge — first-degree rape and predatory sexual assault — because the evidence was insufficient, but convicted him on two still very significant charges which carry a sentence of up to 25 years in prison.

He did not get away with his crimes and as a result others will see that such behaviour will be punished.

But for all the impact of the Weinstein case, it is also an exception. Not just because it involved rich and famous people, but because it has reached a conclusion.

Most rape cases do not: in Britain the number of rape offences reported to the police has risen by about 65 per cent over the last five years, while the number of prosecutions dropped in the last year from 3,034 to 2,343.

There are reasons for that, including the risk of false accusations which have seen some cases collapse. But the criminal justice system needs to keep pace with an important change in the way society now thinks of rape. It is not always a violent assault by a stranger.

It often involves people who know each other well and remain in contact after the assault. It can also involve same-sex couples.

Rape is mostly, but not only, a crime against women, as the conviction last month of Britain’s most prolific rapist, Reynhard Sinaga, an Indonesian student convicted of raping at least 136 young men, shows. Sometimes this gets forgotten.

For the law to find a way through all this is not easy. But it has to try.

Weinstein carried out awful crimes. He did not get away with them. That’s what counts.

Labour’s endless contest

You can tell Labour is in trouble. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown feel the need to agree on what it should do next.

For more than a decade their personal battles defined divisions in the party. Now they are both pleading with it to see sense.

They have endorsed the party’s only Scottish MP, Ian Murray, to be its next deputy leader — against extreme candidates such as Richard Burgon.

To anyone outside the narrow world of Labour obsessions, it’s hard enough to follow the endless battle for the leadership — which isn’t over until April — let alone catch up with the deputy contest, too.

But it matters. If the job lands with the hard Left, voters will notice.

Yorkshire Tea by tweet

Tea has turned political.

The new Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, staged a picture of himself making cuppas for his team, using Yorkshire Tea.

Leftist trolls piled in on Twitter as if the brand is now untouchable.

Their cultural crusade says more about the increasingly crazy obsessions of the Left than it does about the tea.

Sensible people will ignore the idiots and put the kettle on.

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