In similar circumstances I should have been sweating over a hot stove for hours beforehand. What surprises me even more than Mrs Hamilton’s domestic agility is that she and her husband did not seem to remember the trip to Claridge’s when they first put forward their alibi. This referred only to the dinner party at their Battersea flat and, in ironic mode, to the difficulty of making a journey by helicopter from Battersea to Ilford and back in the time available.Whether the Hamiltons were wise to make these and other claims is disputed. We have long had “constitutional experts” who are wheeled on to our screens whenever there is anything about the royal family. We now, God help us, have “experts on media law” who turn out to be lugubrious characters I have never heard of. The consensus, supported by the ubiquitous Mr Max Clifford, was that the Hamiltons would have been better advised to keep their heads down and say as little as possible.I am not so sure about that.

In fact I tend to agree with Lord Harris of High Cross, a friend of theirs, who said they were perfectly entitled to defend themselves After all, it was the police who made the first move It was chance that supplied Mr Louis Theroux’s cameras He happened to be making a programme about the couple. The Hamiltons’ private camera team – or so it must have appeared – clearly discomposed the constabulary. But the various television cameras were out in force as well. Who tipped them off to be at Barkingside police station on time? Was it the police? Or Mr Clifford?The other woman involved besides Mrs Hamilton has to go by the name of Miss A, or whatever, because of the Criminal Justice Act 1988.

This measure persisted with the anonymity of the woman in a rape case which had been established by the Sexual Offences Act 1976. The 1976 Act had also established the anonymity of the alleged rapist. The latter was withdrawn by the 1988 Act; while the anonymity of the victim was continued. It would clearly be better to revert to the position in 1976–88, when both accuser and accused were given anonymity.Mr Clifford’s position was put most clearly in The Spectator: “He met the woman and her uncle on 2 May, when they came to London to tell him about an alleged sex story involving the Hamiltons – not the one now on the police files Clifford asked the woman if she had proof She said she would provide the proof. Four days later the woman rang Clifford with a new story: she had been raped. ‘I told her to go to the police because this was an entirely different matter and she said she had already been to the police and that they were investigating.