RACHEL JOHNSON: Sorry Nick, but women won't ever touch you again... and I don't mean that in a Lord Rennard way By Rachel Johnson Lord Rennard has had the party whip suspended after five women complained he groped them My reactions to the Rennard saga - the ignoble Lord has had the party whip suspended after five women have complained he groped them - have, I realise, followed the classic Kubler-Ross "five stages of grief" post-bereavement almost to the letter: 1) Denial: Even though a judge found the women's claims "broadly credible," at first I agreed with fellow game old trouts, like hacks Dame Ann Leslie and Anne Robinson, who said the aggrieved females needed to toughen up. I also agreed with Lib Dem MEP Chris Davies that touching someone's leg, or rubbing their back through clothing six years ago, "isn't Jimmy Savile," let alone a bad day in Baghdad. I didn't fire back when I received an email from Nick, a novelist friend in his 50s, saying: "So he rested his big ugly hand on a couple of thighs, over their trousers, for ten seconds. Bad manners? Yes, very, for sure. Rape? Anything close? Didn't these women go to teenage discos? 2) Anger: Then I thought, hold on, whatever Nick says, this ill-favoured peer had power over these underling activists and was using this power over their promotions and prospects to try to get their knickers off, and that's not on in the modern equal classless society we (clearly don't) live in. 3) Bargaining: Calmer, I thought, why can't Rennard stop explaining and start apologising? Why can't he just say sorry like Cleggers wants and put an end to this? But, of course, in the next second I realised that human relations, even in wild Westminster, are subject to the law and Rennard could be sued if he says sorry. So there can be no plea-bargain, and it's all going to lead to another pointless, costly investigation. This saga will be leading the Channel 4 News for ever, and only lawyers are going to get lucky with it. 4) Depression: And then it sank in. How could I - a woman! - have ever thought this sort of behaviour was OK or acceptable? How could I - a woman! - have for a second tolerated the assumption that women are sexual prey at work, and their bodies treated like an all-day breakfast buffet? I imagined Lord Rennard doing what he did not to a woman, but to a child, or another man, pressing up against the other person, stroking or groping or offering chocolate while drooling on about something he knew they wanted. Ugh. So creepy. 5) Acceptance: After going through stages 1-4, I then accepted with all my heart that I was misguided at the start of the Kubler-Ross process. The women who complained don't have to change. The culture that surrounds them in politics has to change. Respectful behaviour has been de rigueur in the corporate world for decades, but this same box-ticking correctitude and obeisance to the diktats of Human Resources must now penetrate Parliament and the political parties. Westminster can no longer behave like a private St James club, the sort of place that permits women only in certain rooms at certain hours, and calls all the waiters "George" because it's easier. Lord Rennard was absent from the House of Lords on the day he released a statement saying he would not offer an apology to the women Following Rennard, it must be made explicit that leching, groping, and all forms of all sexual harassment by either sex must not be taken, um, lying down, but officially prohibited, as they are in big companies. More from Rachel Johnson... And now I'm at stage 5, I do think we might all look back on the Rennard affair as a watershed for Westminster, just as Tory sleaze was in the 1990s after John Major's Back To Basics campaign backfired. This was the moment that the Lib Dems revealed that, as a party, it too cannot control itself (even though the leadership has been faster to suspend MP Mike Hancock over allegations that he harassed a vulnerable constituent). For the saga has led to charges that the Lib Dems also made "unwanted advances" at the last Election, and as one letter printed in a newspaper last week teased: "The voters concerned should now do the right thing and apologise to all who have suffered as a result of their actions." All this is especially piquant given the po-facedness of the Lib Dems, the party one would normally expect to be leading the way towards a brighter gender-neutral Scandinavian future where all men and women are equal under the sun. And it may be that Nick Clegg's failure to grip his HR crisis with any conviction - and his wife Miriam's sensible reluctance to save his bacon - could hit his electoral hopes of forming another coalition with the Tories, at any rate, as it will be so damaging to the female vote. As Barack Obama tweeted last week: "You can judge a nation, and how successful it will be, based on how it treats its women and its girls." The Lib Dems have behaved so ineptly I expect many of their professional women supporters won't touch them with a bargepole next May, post-Rennard. Not even through clothing. Lovely Katherine NEVER hides her own assets Katherine Jenkins said she would never present a sexually provocative image in her videos It's all very well for gorgeous Katherine Jenkins, OBE. Sporting her new bottle-brown hair, Jenkins said she would never present a sexually provocative image in videos. She has also advised younger female singers not to do raunchy shoots and "know their boundaries." Quite. But one might point out that the Welsh songbird is fond of "flaunting her curves" in low-cut ballgowns on her album covers, and no one could really claim she has hidden her considerable lights under a bushel. So, the much-unmarried Francois Hollande has hinted he may see Obama next month sans any female companion. This leads me to hope that politics can now dispense with First Ladies. Hollande's affair confirms that the political "plus one" is unchic and very 2013, if not House of Tudor. It's so depressing that two grown women have been waiting to discover if they are First Lady or Second Girlfriend or only the last woman Hollande went to bed with, as if he were Henry VIII rather than a dull accountant who looks like a horse butcher in Lille. Powerful men will always be attractive to a certain sort of woman. But ambitious women should never let their own status be defined by their relationship. It is fatal. If she does, he calls the shots. And that is what happened when Hollande wrote her out of the romantic script. Trierweiler yesterday discovered she will never be Once, Twice or even Three Times the First Lady for Le President ever again. Big Brother and his dirty secret And so to Celebrity Big Brother, which has been a steamily vintage series this year. Liz Jones is out, looking radiant, and complaining the blinged-up house was "dirty" and her housemates "ate so much." I'm not surprised. When I went to visit, I had to powder my nose, and can reveal the one toilet had a stained synthetic orange carpet and the lock was broken, so you had to relieve yourself with your foot jammed hard against the door.