I was half-listening to a conversation between my wife and her hairstylist through an open doorway to another room at our house.

I wasn’t eavesdropping – they knew I was there and were talking quite loudly above the hum of the hairdryer.

It can be a hair-raising experience for various reasons other than the flurry of activity around my wife’s head.

What caught my attention was the hairdresser describing how much she enjoyed the television drama Believe Me.

It’s about real-life London taxi driver John Worboys, who was jailed for drugging and raping around 12 women (but suspected of many more) by literally using his cabbie job as a vehicle for sex attacks.

The story was dominated by the courageous battle of his victims to make their voices heard – and, above all, to be believed against a wall of callous police indifference they faced initially.

Not the sort of dramatisation you’d describe as “enjoyable”.

What she actually took satisfaction from was the victims’ final victory against all the odds; a triumph for all women.

For me, there’s common ground between public revulsion over Worboys and a similar but unconnected set of circumstances hundreds of miles away in Inverness.

Councillors on the Highlands licensing committee provoked an angry public backlash for inexplicably allowing a taxi operator’s licence to remain in the name of another convicted rapist cab driver in their area.

I’m not being clever after the event, but I thought instantly of Worboys as soon as........

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