The lesson from the Phillip Schofield scandal? A moral grey area is not OK in any workplace

theguardian.com:

Imagine an older man, in his 50s, 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