A couple of years ago, while my old boarding school was taking centre stage at Holyrood’s Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry over historic allegations of horrific bullying, a friend’s little brother sent me an email he’d received from another friend of his.
Lots of people, they’d both agreed, had been vicious. Some of the older boys, though, hadn’t actually been that bad.
For example, he wrote, he remembered one early night when he’d been desperate for the toilet but had tied his dressing gown too tight and couldn’t take it off.
Fortunately, moments before life-ruining humiliation from an approaching mob, “Hugo Rifkind walked past and I asked him to help.
