In 2006 Ellie Cumbo, a former Lib Dem supporter, worked as a day-to-day organiser of the Campaign for Gender Balance, the party's internal initiative to mentor and train female would-be candidates for parliament. Cumbo says that staff were made aware at the time of the allegations that Rennard had sexually molested female volunteers and staff.

But the Deputy Prime Minister and Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has repeatedly changed his account of the allegations. At first he said he was unaware of the allegations, then admitted that he had been aware of "indirect and non-specific" concerns. Paul Burstow, the then Chief Whip, refused to answer a radio presenter as to whether or not he was aware of the allegations.

Neither Ellie Cumbo nor any of the other women who were working on the campaign during the time she was there have been approached by the internal inquiry into the Rennard affair.

"The dominance of individualist, Orange Book liberalism and its advocates over the last decade has pushed issues of [women's] inequality further and further away from mainstream Lib Dem thought," says Cumbo. "Couple this with the lack of women's voices, especially at the top, and you end up with a serious gender problem. How do you tackle sexual harassment at the root if you don't link it to the ways in which men still have more power than women, if, indeed, you don't really see gender as socially relevant at all?"

I first took notice of the sexual politics of the Lib Dems in 1994. As a feminist campaigner against sexual violence I had recently become involved in the contentious debate on the sex industry. I took the approach that prostitution is both a cause and consequence of inequality, but the sexual libertarians argued that it was no different from other paid work.

That year, in a policy paper entitled "Confronting Prostitution", the Lib Dems recommended that Britain allow state regulated brothels, legalise prostitution and introduce legally enforceable contracts for prostitutes. The paper was endorsed by the front bench and approved by the party's national conference. It remains party policy.