The real parliamentary sex scandal is the cover-up – and how little Theresa May will be allowed to do about it

May knows she can’t sort this out: she’s the figurehead of a boys’ club whose male members would scream ‘Witch hunt!’ if she ever dared to try

Mark Garnier is being investigated after admitting that he asked an assistant to buy him a sex toy (AFP)

Of all prime-ministerial perks, the most obscure is the gossip. Everyone knows about the grand houses, the quality time with the monarch and the power to go to war. But even those unimpressed by Chequers, warfare and the annual weekend ma’aming it up at Balmoral might be tempted by all the juicy goss.

God knows why it took Harvey Weinstein to re-awaken interest in the distasteful and repugnant ways male politicians maltreat women. But one distant aftershock from the Hollywood quake is the revelation that the Chief Whip pops in once a week to brief the PM about what her or his naughtiest MPs have been up to.

Here, as elsewhere, the incumbent seems tragically unsuited to her post. Can you think of a politician less interested in tittle, or come to that in tattle, than Theresa May?

Perhaps the puritanical Attlee was equally impervious. After Clem, I visualise every premier (including Thatcher) being enjoyably shocked – shocked! – by the news that this one likes being dragged around a dungeon by the collar, and that one was in A&E late Friday night having a vacuum nozzle liberated from his anal canal.

Theresa May’s reaction to such tidings, so the papers report, isn’t to suck her teeth and murmur: “Well, I never! A top of the range Dyson V8, you say?” It’s a world-weary: “Why can’t they just do their jobs?”

The question confirms her lethal lack of imagination. Shackled to that Arthur Askey husband at Oxford, utterly focused on her career ever since, she has been left a stranger to the more recherché corners of carnal desire by a narrow, sheltered life.

But being bemused by how others (almost invariably men) are diverted from their constituency duties and red boxes by urges straddling the sexual spectrum from the comical, via the grotesque, to the criminal – that’s no excuse for tolerating abuse.

Whips of all parties have always accumulated filth on MPs to use for blackmail. You get the flavour from House of Cards (the superior British original), in which Francis Urquhart uses his black book of sexual transgressions to destroy his leadership rivals and bully backbenchers, on pain of their dirty little secrets seeping into the popular prints.

But what if, as you might assume, the files in the safe contain well-sourced allegations of sexual harassment and assault? Might that leave a PM who turned a blind eye technically liable to prosecution as an accessory after the fact, or for conspiring to pervert the course of justice?

While the case of Mark Garnier, minister for “Brexit trade” (an oxymoron, surely?) has no criminal implications, it is less hilarious than our more Neanderthal MPs will think. In the hours since the Mail on Sunday broke the story, the gallant Garnier has admitted addressing his secretary as “sugar tits”, and sending her into a Soho shop to buy a brace of choicest vibrators on his behalf.

Even Chuckles Gove, the Rumpelstiltskin of sexual wit, couldn’t spin that into comedy gold. And whether or not this is a relatively trivial abuse of the power imbalance between male boss and female employee, it simply isn’t funny.

With Stephen Crabb, one of the rivals who cleared May’s path to power in a fashion eerily similar to Francis Urquhart’s, it is worse. Having quit his leadership bid when outed for sexting, Crabb now fesses up to having sent “explicit messages” to a woman of 19 he interviewed for a job in 2013 when a minister for Wales.

What he calls “foolish”, I call “an abuse of power for which the Speaker should drag him from the Commons by the penis, promising to remove it with rusty garden secateurs if he ever tries to return”. Tomayto, tomahto…

Theresa May does intend to involve John Bercow, though in a more restrained role as an adviser about how to deal with DisHon Mems. Meanwhile, leading Labour rent-a-gob John Mann advocates a “Sex-Pest Tsar”. Fair enough. The Speaker-Tsar axis might nudge Parliament’s sexual mores towards the 21st century.

But what of the gravest suspicions and allegations, contemporary and “historic”, secreted in the whips’ safes? There must be hundreds of misdemeanours far more serious than “sugar tits” and sexting buried there.

This scandal isn’t about Garnier and Crabb, two among dozens of MPs whose private lives would no-doubt illuminate the rancid inadequacies of the middle-aged male if brought to public notice. The scandal, as usual, is the cover-up. It’s a whipping system designed to hide misdemeanours and use them later for political gain.

At its more banal, it perpetuates hypocrisies such as Crabb running for PM, however briefly, on the Christian family values ticket. At its vilest, it may have helped enable Cyril Smith to abuse children when he should have been serving time.

If Theresa May is serious about curing this chronic infection in the bloodstream of the body politic, she will fight it with sunlight. Wherever there is strong evidence of a sexual offence, moral or criminal or both, it should be removed from the whips’ safe and exposed to the cleansing light of day.

But I don’t imagine May will do that. She can’t afford to, as the figurehead of a boys’ club whose male members would scream “Witch hunt!” if she did, and the hostage of a tottering Government that could fall at any time for any number of reasons.

So fragile is her house of cards that the sacking of two or three ministers known for abusing their power over women could bring it down. This is why May’s approach to this problem will, I expect, contrast with those MPs who have yet to learn how not to mistreat women. She will be resolutely hands-off.