The lesson from the Phillip Schofield scandal? A
moral grey area is not OK in any workplace
Gaby
Hinsliff
In the post-#MeToo era we are much more alert to power
imbalances in relationships; it’s time employers started exercising their duty
of care
Mon 29 May
2023 14.42 BST
Imagine an
older man, in his late 40s, in a position of swaggering power and influence. A
cabinet minister, maybe, or an industry bigshot.
He meets a
starstruck 15-year-old desperate to get into the business, and encourages her
to apply for a job in his office when she’s old enough. It’s an unbelievable
opportunity and so, after turning 18, she follows it up and gets the job.
Shortly afterwards, this kindly (and did I mention married?) mentor begins
sleeping with this grateful now 20-year-old mentee, who is younger than his own
daughter. What would you think of him?
For most,
the answer will surely be an instinctive shudder: too creepy by half. It’s not
actually against the law, if she is over the age of consent, though in some
workplaces it would break rules on intra-office romances. But ethically it’s
dubious, to say the least. She would be nobody without him, and he could
probably get her fired tomorrow – no matter how eagerly consenting, it’s hard
to see this as a relationship of true equals. But also, no matter how much you
think you know about love in your early 20s, only later do you realise that you
didn’t know the half of it. This relationship would be at best, in Phillip
Schofield’s words, “unwise, but not illegal”; at worst, as the former culture
secretary Nadine Dorries put it, an abuse of “authority, power and trust”.
And yes, of
course, this is about Schofield, the erstwhile king of daytime TV, dethroned
last week by the revelation that he had an affair with a runner on the show,
whom he had initially met as a 15-year-old theatre school pupil, and then when
rumours started to surface about their closeness in 2020, he lied about it to
his bosses at ITV, his co-star Holly Willoughby, his agent, and later to
journalists, who were told that the concerns they’d got wind of were all just
“malicious gossip”. (He only finally confessed all, in a grovelling letter to
the Daily Mail, after his now ex-lover apparently told lawyers hired by
Schofield that he didn’t want to carry on pretending the relationship had never
existed.) The only difference from the fictional scenario outlined at the top
of this article is that Schofield is gay and his lover was a young man, not a
woman.
His
sexuality is not irrelevant here: one explanation for why Schofield might have
lied is that he was still very much married and in the closet at the time
journalists first started asking questions. (He insists that his emotional
public coming out a few months later, live on the show and attracting
widespread praise for his bravery, was unrelated to the swirling rumours.) But
Schofield’s sexuality also, in some respects, unhelpfully clouds things. Gay
men in general are still too often unfairly caricatured as predatory, out to
get your children. The story has triggered much genuine concern for the welfare
of Schofield’s young lover, but also some naked homophobia, particularly as it
follows the recent conviction of Schofield’s brother, Timothy, for sexual
offences involving a child; one wonders too if there was a faint nervousness in
some quarters at ITV about being seen as homophobic for questioning the
presenter too aggressively.
Strip all
that away, imagine the runner was a star-struck woman more than 30 years
Schofield’s junior, and we can see this relationship clearly for the complex
problem it is; one with implications way beyond the shallow waters of daytime
telly.
Schofield
has quit, and at 61 seems unlikely ever to work in prime time again. That
leaves This Morning’s editors, his co-stars and more senior ITV executives all
in the line of fire over what they did or didn’t know and what they should or
shouldn’t have done, in a post-#MeToo era where we are all much more alert to
imbalances of power in relationships but still not sure exactly what to do
about them. If people at ITV knew full well what was happening and simply lied
to the media to protect their star presenter, then heads should obviously roll.
But if, as they insist, Schofield and his then boyfriend repeatedly denied at
the time there was anything untoward going on and they had nothing to go on but
hearsay – well, what then?
Perhaps
something will emerge over the coming days to shed new light on this story. But
based on what we know at this stage, we’re not talking about another Harvey
Weinstein or Jimmy Savile; rather something that may not technically amount to
a sackable offence, but which was always likely to be a resigning one once it
became public.
Too many of
us, in middle age, have looked back since #MeToo at things we unblinkingly
accepted when we were young but that now seem frankly disturbing, and, once
seen, these patterns are hard to unsee in others. The unwritten but universally
understood rule of television is that presenters can’t make the public feel
uncomfortable – especially not in the cosy, cheesy, squeaky-clean world of
daytime telly, which presents itself as one big happy family, whatever may be
going on behind the scenes. (The show’s former resident doctor, Ranj Singh, has
described This Morning’s culture as “toxic” for reasons that he said went well
beyond its host. Schofield denies that, calling his critics a “handful of people
with a grudge against me or the show”.)
In dealing
with the rumours, ITV had a duty of care to a potentially vulnerable young man
and also to a presenter whose sexuality was not yet public knowledge, to
colleagues who were clearly finding the situation awkward, not to mention
everyone employed on a show whose future is now in doubt as a consequence of
all its secrets leaking out. In the absence of concrete proof, the best option
would have been to quietly transfer the runner to another show – which is ultimately
what happened – and make very clear to Schofield that inappropriate behaviour
on set would be career-ending, backing that up by inserting stiff clauses in
everyone’s contracts about workplace relationships, which would enable ITV to
take action if necessary. But that would still have left the channel with a
difficult judgment to make about its star’s future.
This is
tricky new territory for employers to navigate, and ITV doubtless won’t be the
first or last to get it wrong as they stumble into a grey area that barely
existed a decade ago. For men of Schofield’s age, however, the lesson could not
be clearer: if you somehow can’t bring yourself to date someone your own age,
then aim at least for the same generation, if you don’t want to be perceived as
sad and seedy. Once upon a time, a dewy-eyed partner younger than your own kids
used to be a common rich man’s trophy, a symbol even of power and virility.
These days, it looks more like a hostage to fortune.
Gaby
Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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