The Labour Party's got so sexist that Trump and Weinstein will release a joint statement condemning its behaviour

If you were a cynic you might suggest that sometimes the people professing outrage aren’t really all that horrified at all

At least Jared O’Mara kept matters reasonably simple by being unarguably foul (Twitter)

You can’t blame the Labour Party for letting one of their members, Jared O’Mara, slip through the system and become an MP, even though he made comments online calling gay people “fudgepackers” and women at a club “sexy little slags”.

Because two years ago those in charge of the party went through the Twitter accounts and blogs of every member and anyone who applied to be a member, to find truly disgusting comments that should exclude them from membership, such as “I voted for the Green Party once”, and “At least Jeremy Corbyn didn’t support the war in Iraq”.

And when you’ve employed rooms full of people to stay up all night hunting down filth like that, it’s understandable if they miss the odd “fudgepacker” comment.

Luckily there are other organisations dedicated to rooting out sexism, such as The Sun newspaper. They’ve produced a “rap sheet” detailing the MP’s anti-women record, because if there’s one publication that’s been vigorous in promoting women over the last 40 years, it’s been The Sun, under Rupert “Suffragette” Murdoch.

To start with, what other newspaper has dedicated an entire page every day to a woman?

The daily editorial meeting at The Sun must be like a student feminist debating society, with the board high-fiving each other because their headline “Towie’s Lauren Pope – NUDE!!!” makes such a powerful statement against patriarchal male domination. Then the sports section all chant “we are women, we are strong” while searching for a photo of Jamie Vardy’s wife in her bra.

Similarly, the Conservatives have been faultless in bringing up this story as often as they can, as if anything they’re too vigilant in ensuring their politicians are supportive of women. If they had an MP who, to pick an example at random, boasted he’d never changed a nappy on any of his six children because that was woman’s work according to a divine natural order, he’d be thrown straight out of the party whether he’d been to Eton and had a double-barrelled name or not.

By the weekend Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein will publish a joint statement complaining that Labour MPs should be ashamed of themselves for disrespecting women like this, and they both demand the Labour Party NEC takes a firm line on this sort of behaviour.

If you were a cynic you might suggest there’s a modern trend to make allegations of sexism, racism and causing offence, as a weapon to attack rival factions in organisations, and sometimes the people professing outrage aren’t really all that horrified at all.

The Ku Klux Klan probably have arguments that go “Peter shouldn’t be allowed to stand as Grand Wizard, because while we were placing a burning cross on a family’s lawn he was overheard making an offensive joke about the Nigerian community, and that’s the sort of thing that can bring white supremacism into ill repute”.

But at least Jared O’Mara kept matters reasonably simple by being unarguably foul. It’s not easy to see what his defence might be for referring to “sexy little slags”, though maybe he was describing some mounds of coal that had formed themselves into a particularly erotic shape.

It may be more complicated with the comment made by MP Clive Lewis, who was overheard saying to a man, “Get on your knees, bitch”.

This was recorded and put online and led to thousands of people shouting, “I was so offended when I clicked onto Youtube and heard someone say something clearly not literally what he meant but said as a jokey character, that I am deeply traumatised and ever since then I can’t eat peanut butter because I’m DISGUSTED”.

What we have to assess, is whether Clive Lewis meant what he said literally. It’s certainly possible he felt a sudden urge to command his friend to get on his knees and act out a subservient role akin to what we might expect from a slave in the Roman Empire, in the middle of a hall in the Labour conference. Or it may be possible he was saying it ironically, in a sort of character.

This is where some people may tend to get more upset than necessary, by taking every comment they hear literally, and out of context. This becomes especially tricky with jokes.

They must spend every Christmas arguing with everyone who reads from a Christmas cracker “how can you say that what’s red and sits in the corner is a naughty strawberry? A strawberry has no sense of behaviour, and if they have then we should seek avenues of integrating the strawberry into a domestic environment and not exclude it by making it sit in a corner”.

Then they create a list of subjects “you can’t make jokes about”. So you might be told “you can’t make jokes about Hitler”, in which case Charlie Chaplin should never have made The Great Dictator, and during the war, when people sang that Hitler only had one ball, they should all have been made to resign and spend three months on a correctional course.

On Twitter there is no collection of words that won’t be “called out” as offensive by someone. If you call Donald Trump a psychopath, someone will reply “don’t add to the trauma against psychopaths. They’re suffering too, they’ve got nowhere to put their salad as their fridge is full of heads. Think about that next time please.”

And possibly the most troubling aspect of this modern obsession with permanent offence is that it damages the genuine causes they claim to be in aid of.

Because the old-fashioned way of campaigning was to emphasise unity and sticking together, but now there’s a new fun way, in which you work tirelessly to find points of disagreement, until you refuse to appear in the same room as someone else, because they use a different word for transgender squirrels, the fascists.