A traditional British Christmas is not complete until we have all enjoyed the seasonal cancellation of a celebrity, under the mistletoe. Excitement mounts during Advent as to who the luckless sap might be this year and then, on cue, the little cardboard door is at last opened and we all gather around the tree for a joyous hatefest.

I was fairly happy with this year’s choice, the comedian and children’s author David Walliams, as there is something about his manner and that weird shiny moonface which has always slightly irritated me. He has been dropped by his publisher, HarperCollins, and the BBC has announced it has no plans to work with him in the future as a consequence of it being reported that he had harassed women at the publishing firm (Walliams denies the claims) and had previously made lewd comments about women on the set of Britain’s Got Talent, the awful TV show upon which he was, for a while, a judge.

I must have read several thousand words regarding Mr Walliams’s alleged behaviour and I still do not have the remotest clue as to what it is he has done. There were even first-person testimonies from women he had grievously transgressed and no detail there, either, about what had actually transpired. The most I could glean was that he had been ‘rude’ to women, or perhaps ‘inappropriate’, although quite in what way was never even remotely explained. However one woman befriended by Walliams when she was 17 let slip that he had been in the habit of inviting contestants........

© The Spectator