In those early days, the sense of an angel of death targeting a particular community seemed like the realisation of a nightmare. When it first emerged in the US it was known as GRID (gay-related immune deficiency). An article appeared in the New York Times on 3 July 1981 with the ominous headline: “Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals.” Some called it the “gay plague”.

Confusion turned into widespread panic, not limited to the gay community. The first time I heard of the disease was during a PE lesson at primary school. Such was the general ignorance that our teacher warned us not to borrow each other’s plimsolls or we’d catch Aids. Some time later I saw the government’s public health advert on the television; I remember little about it except the large tombstone with the dreaded four-letter acronym as an epitaph.

In the 40 years since the virus was identified, there has been a sea-change in attitudes. Whereas the government’s campaign set out to frighten people with the message “it’s a deadly disease and there’s no known cure”, a recent advert by the Terrence Higgins Trust reminds people that those diagnosed with HIV “can live a healthy, happy life just like anyone else”. Much of the stigma has dissipated.

The same is true of homosexuality itself. One could say that the while the Aids crisis exacerbated the hatred and mistrust against an already beleaguered community, it also spurred activists onto the pathway to normalisation. Whereas the pursuit of a gay lifestyle was romanticised — or demonised — as a dance of Eros and Thanatos, a way to ensure that one remained beyond the scope of civilised society, today the very notion of being orientated towards one’s own sex is largely perceived as unremarkable. Those who bleat about their oppression as gay people in a climate of widespread tolerance are luxuriating in a kind of perverse nostalgia for a reality they could never comprehend.

For those who lived through it, the Aids crisis was a moment when the concept of a “gay community” actually meant something. Lesbians were instrumental in providing support for their gay brothers, and amid the loss there was a sense of greater solidarity. I remember seeing a production of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart in New York in 2004. The audience mostly comprised of older gay men, and Kramer was among them. Afterwards, people were visibly shaken from watching the worst of their past so unflinchingly dramatised. One man approached Kramer and, through his sobs, I heard him simply say: “thank you”.

Kramer has been credited as a kind of Cassandra figure, one who had warned that the hedonism of gay life in the late Seventies would lead to trouble. His novel Faggots (1978) was loathed by conservatives for its graphic depiction of the sexual free-for-alls of New York’s bathhouse culture, but it was also mistrusted by the gay community for its moralising implications. Its lead character is on an impossible quest to find meaningful love in a world of fleeting sexual encounters. Kramer was criticising what he saw as a sybaritic and morally vacuous culture, and the sense of an impending reckoning has led to the novel being interpreted as predicting the outbreak of Aids.

When the crisis exploded, Kramer was one of those calling on gay men to exercise sexual temperance, and to shut the bathhouses until the virus could be contained. For this he was accused of being a puritan and a traitor to the gay lifestyle. His play The Normal Heart is set around this time, and in one furious monologue a character rails against a Kramer-type figure for trying to make gay men feel ashamed of their own liberation.

For the ultra-religious, Aids was seen as a righteous punishment from God. Many had been appalled at the promiscuity that inevitably arises when women are no longer in the equation. Male sexuality has always been contained to a degree by the institution of marriage, but gay men had been forced to exist on the periphery. There was no need to abide by sexual mores, because the rules had clearly not been written with them in mind. In other words, sex became an integral aspect of their own defiance against the society that had shunned them.

It always seemed a catch-22. Gay men were loathed for their sexual licentiousness, and at the same time excluded from the very ethical framework that would, to a degree, offer some kind of incentive against it. In his 1982 lecture, “Rediscovering gay history”, the historian John Boswell addressed this fundamental contradiction and argued for the need for a gay archetype or moral aspiration. He pointed out that when a straight man cheated on his wife, he at least knew that he was falling short of society’s expectations. But the same could not be said for gay men:

“I think that part of the reason for the ambivalence of the intellectual establishment in the United States is that they can’t tell when they read a book like Edmund White’s States of Desire, whether the life of casual promiscuity it depicts represents a homosexual ideal or the failure of an ideal. Are they reading about what gay people should do, what they do, or both, or neither? So they don’t know how to fit it into their usual critical apparatus. They don’t understand what would be a departure from homosexual ethics because they don’t know what homosexual ethics would be. And neither do we.”

Boswell was right that this ambivalence existed within and without the gay community. When William Friedkin’s film Cruising was released in 1980, the most vehement opposition came from gay campaigners who feared that it would depict them as being inherently deviant. And yet the movie had been shot in the leather bars of New York City, and the real-life sex acts that were filmed were hardly atypical. This subculture may not have been reflective of gay society as a whole, but it certainly existed.

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Perhaps it could be said that the activists who sought to ban Cruising won out in the end. Their implicit goal was that gay people could be brought under the aegis of heterosexual respectability — that they could, in other words, live as conventionally as everybody else. It didn’t surprise me at all, therefore, that it was a conservative government in the UK that eventually legalised same-sex marriage. It would appear that we have seen the cultivation in the Western world of the kind of shared ethical ideals that Boswell seemed to crave. Gay monogamy is no longer seen as an oxymoron.

Many gay rights groups, of course, opposed same-sex marriage. To them, it was a way to control gay people, to bring them within the same heteronormative yoke that dominated the rest of society. This debate echoed those of The Normal Heart, where there was a fear of an attempt to “civilise” those who had found freedom in occupying a realm outside of social convention. To be gay was to be different, and for many this was a source of pride. An older gay man once told me that sex was far more exhilarating when it was illegal. It meant that even the most casual sexual encounter was a little act of rebellion.

But even as tolerance has increased, anti-gay feeling has not gone away. The Aids crisis galvanised such prejudices, and of course religious fundamentalists have always opposed those who they deem to be acting against the wishes of their various gods. Today, these prejudices are resurfacing through the obsession with gender identity, an ideology that shames gay people for not being attracted to members of the opposite sex and has been responsible for the government-funded medicalisation of gay youth. In many ways, this is a “progressive” rehash of Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, with its prohibition in schools against the “promotion” or “acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”.

The instinctive disgust that many people feel towards those who do not share their own sexual inclinations is seemingly hard-wired, and so what we call “homophobia” will always emerge in one way or another in a majority heterosexual culture. But at least to be gay is no longer defined solely by the sexual act, and that for one man to fall in love with another is widely considered to be an unexceptional fact of life. The gay rights activists of yesteryear weren’t necessarily calling for universal indifference, but perhaps we’ll get there in the end.

The answer, it seems, lies in a shift in the global HIV response, one that the United Nations hopes will finally “end Aids by 2030”. To push HIV out of the “crisis” stage, in which it has been stuck for decades, and shrink the rate of new infections, health practitioners want a massive roll-out of the preventative medications that are no longer protected by drug company patents or exclusivities. And they want to target that specific sub-population that is disproportionately affected by HIV: transwomen who have sex with men.

In parts of the world, trans prostitutes are up to 80 times more likely than anyone else to be HIV-positive. It is estimated, for example, that in Brazil, as many as a third of travestis — male prostitutes with a female identity — are HIV-positive. Elsewhere, hijra, kathoeys and waria — names used in different cultures for males who adopt female names, clothing, hairstyles and pronouns — are a significant concern for health officials, since they are tricky to monitor and tend to have risky sex with men who often have a female partner at home.

To encourage these at-risk individuals to take part in HIV testing and treatment programmes, global health experts want to offer them a form of integrated care, which could include hormones, reassignment surgery referrals, and other “affirming” services alongside PrEP. As a study in The Journal of the International Aids Society made clear as far back as 2016: in scaling up PrEP for trans women, it is essential to engage trans communities, utilise trans-inclusive research and marketing strategies and identify and/or train healthcare providers to provide gender-affirming healthcare to trans women.”

In India, for instance, a recent white paper detailed a scheme to incentivise hijra and “transgender persons” to take part in HIV screening that involves a comprehensive package of services including gender-affirming care. In Thailand, one programme found that kathoeys were more likely to show up to clinics if they were staffed by transwomen — inspiring trials of similar initiatives in the Philippines, Myanmar and Nepal. It is a strategy that has been adopted in the developed West, too, albeit one that lacks transparency. In 2021, the US Department of Health and Human Services ordered HIV clinics to start offering “gender-affirming care” — a move celebrated in March this year, when the White House made clear that the federal government’s strategy “to end the HIV epidemic” included providing “access to gender affirming care and treatment services to transgender and gender diverse individuals with HIV”.

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It is not unusual for health authorities to group services together, or incentivise individuals to make healthy choices. But we have known for at least two decades that transwomen are inordinately at risk of being exposed to HIV. As long ago as 2009, doctors in community clinics in California reported that the availability of hormones and other affirming care would make trans patients more likely to show up to clinics for prevention.

The shift in attention may be down to the fact that, in recent years, with lesbian and gay equality effectively secured in much of the West, LGBT organisations have started to champion transgender causes. But it may also be down to the fact that, in some countries, HIV transmission is beginning to occur at a faster rate among heterosexuals than gay and bisexual men. And this is perhaps in part due to a subsection of heterosexuals, who have transwomen as partners.

Gynandromorphophilia was first coined in 1984 to describe the sexual preferences of ostensibly heterosexual men who are also attracted to males with exaggerated female features, such as big breasts, hips and lips. Gynandromorphophilic males (or Gamps for short) play a role in the transmission of HIV to the general population because their sexual relations with these often high-risk men put their own female partners at risk, which can also result in the virus being passed to unborn babies. We know, too, that heterosexuals tend to be diagnosed late, once their immune system has already been compromised. This also applies to their female partners, who might never suspect that they have been exposed.

In 1995, when Belgian virologist Peter Piot was entrusted with leading the global Aids response at UNAids, it didn’t take him long to realise that stigma relating to sex was the real barrier to ending the epidemic. Shaming “people with diverse sexuality”, Piot said, forces them into the shadows and keeps the virus in circulation.

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In an effort to address the estimated 4,500 undiagnosed HIV cases in the UK and halt the virus, the NHS now recommends that certain at-risk groups “may benefit” from taking the now widely and freely available PrEP medication. These at-risk groups include “trans or non-binary person [who] are regularly having condomless sex”. And with this group, “gender-affirming” incentives will increasingly be a part of that medicalising strategy.

While there is an urgent and noble objective here — the eradication of HIV — my worry is that it is taking place without any serious public debate about the consequences. With so much still unknown about the effects of transitioning, gender-affirming therapy is being made more accessible. And at what cost? Only when the HIV epidemic finally ends, will it become clear how subtly it has reshaped the world it’s left behind.

It had been announced that Freddie was HIV positive — a sombre moment. The next day, I was curled up with a blanket watching the television. The news came on; Freddie was dead. Bohemian Rhapsody started to play. I’ve never been quite certain whether I cried so much because I had a fever of 102 degrees, or whether the floods would have come anyway. It meant a lot.

In 1991, HIV/AIDS had been part of our lives for 10 years. There had been plenty of deaths. Many of those deaths had happened in groups of people less likely to make themselves known to us — it was cutting a terrible swathe through Africa, for instance. Haemophiliacs and intravenous drug users who contracted HIV remained, for the most part, as statistics. The public face of the disease in the West — the individual and conspicuous cases — were gay men, and in particular those gay men who were already in the public eye.

Denholm Elliott, Ian Charleson, Tony Richardson. Kenny Everett, Derek Jarman, Sylvester, John Curry, Bruce Chatwin — the list of British deaths alone is long and sobering. It was Freddie’s, though, that made the biggest impact. He seemed so embedded in British life, from the unprecedented impact of Bohemian Rhapsody in 1975 to the unforgettable turn at the first Live Aid in 1985.

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He had achieved this status, too, despite being very unusual: unmistakably gay, Parsi, with a musical persona marrying debauched lechery, sustained tragic grandeur (Barcelona!) and extreme silliness. Everyone loved him. To us as gay men, he might have indicated that you didn’t need to fit in. You could be whatever you were, and that would make perfect sense. Perhaps that was an illusion. After all, Freddie never exactly came out.

Thirty years on, I start to wonder just how much HIV/AIDS shaped the lives of people like me. I was relatively lucky; by the time I was becoming sexually active, we knew about safe sex. Lucky, too, to live in a country where the advice from quite early on was to use condoms, rather than to adjust your morality or to attempt monogamy. Gay men born five or 10 years before me saw most of their friends die; I lost perhaps a dozen, no more.

All the same, we lived in a world where a fundamental truth was influencing all our actions, and it was this: You might die soon. Not many generations of people live through their twenties and thirties with this somewhere near the front of their minds. It has an inevitable effect on what you do. In recent years, friends in their twenties and thirties have sometimes asked me whether I ever thought of having children. It never crossed my mind as a reasonable possibility. It wasn’t until the late Nineties that I even gave way to a long temptation, and got a dog — I mean, dogs can easily live 15 years. It might turn out not to be fair.

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Looking back, there might have been other consequences to this looming terror. One of them might have been a general state of mind that can only be summed up as “Fuck it”. You might as well do what you had in mind. Shame more or less disappeared as a state of mind. I knew a lot of straight literary people who anguished and writhed and wasted time over the question of whether they should or should not write a novel, taking it for granted that they’d live another 60 years. Fuck it. I wrote one, then another, then another. People younger than me were dying of the virus, after all.

There were other consequences of that fuck-it mentality. Gay society took on a dangerous and reckless flavour, with the first all-night clubs like Trade — there was one point in the Nineties where we worked out that you could go to one dance club after another without a break between 10pm on a Friday to lunchtime on Monday. Some queens really did it. The mood of outrageous bad taste was universal. One of Derek Jarman’s last paintings was called Arse-Injected Death Syndrome. “Bad news,” a dear friend said to me once. “I’ve got the fucking Death Clap.” And burst out laughing.

Maybe, too, the sense that you might be dead in five years brought people together, to disagree and argue and yell, but with a sense that your different opinions were all in the same bundle. A lot of my generation find it pretty weird that speakers for what is now called the LGBTQI community seem obsessed with determining who can be admitted to their ranks, or excluded. It wouldn’t have seemed a very pressing question in the Eighties and Nineties, and we haven’t forgotten how important the support of lesbians was to gay men during the crisis. It went a long way towards unifying a community.

By the turn of the century, things were changing. The new century went on; we started to hear the words “living with HIV” as an accurate description, and not as a hopeful euphemism. The habit of hedonism remained; the urgency of protest receded. Gay Pride renamed itself as Mardi Gras; it turned into a parade of LGBT-supporting businesses, anybody gay and lesbian without an official wristband confined behind barriers.

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We might, after all, live as long as anyone else, and people started to marry, to adopt children, to stay in boring jobs, to talk about pensions and property. I got married to my boyfriend; I paid off my mortgage; we got a small Schnauzer called Greta, who is still going to be here in 2035, as I hope to be. The friend of mine who told me he had “the fucking Death Clap” is, for all purposes, perfectly healthy.

Freddie goes on, not as a martyr, but as a marvellous, unique presence who did something never seen before and never really attempted since. Quite a lot of him has since been toned down; when the jukebox musical We Will Rock You opened, it was striking that it turned Freddie’s music into the backdrop to a straight romance between a couple of kids. Freddie was outrageous in a way that might not be permitted now; a six-minute pop song with casual incorporations of the Islamic imprecation “Bismillah”; the Tom of Finland image with moustache and crotch-clinging trousers; the Live Aid performance, including the borderline sexual harassment, live, of the onstage cameraman.

His outrageousness was extinguished by a disease, but the presence of that disease fed and spread something of the same outrageousness: that desire to say “Fuck it” from time to time. I think any gay person who lived through the ten years between the discovery of HIV/Aids and Freddie Mercury’s death — lived though it as a sexual being — will always have been shaped by it. Maybe always set slightly apart from what followed, too. If they lived.

It’s not that these scares were completely unfounded. People have been convicted for deliberately infecting others with HIV, albeit through sex, not needles. And in 1989, a group of teenage girls were arrested for jabbing women with pins in New York “for fun”. But if there was ever a case of someone infected with HIV by a deliberate needle attack, I can’t find any record of it. The panic was essentially an urban legend, like razor blades hidden in Halloween sweets.

Now, students are reporting being jabbed with needles in nightclubs, not to spread HIV but to drug them. The Home Secretary, Priti Patel, has called for the police to look into it. It’s part of a wider concern about drink spiking, which recently inspired a national boycott of nightclubs, “Girls Night In”. But how worried should we be?

First, let’s talk about needle druggings. There are stories. In the US, for instance, eight people died at a festival, apparently crushed during a crowd surge. There were unrelated reports of a security guard and others being jabbed with a needle. But none of them have been confirmed.

And jabbing someone with a needle is not easy. One academic I spoke to said that “incapacitating someone with a needle is something the NKVD [the Russian secret police] would have to do”. It hurts, for a start; and getting it into the bloodstream via the leg or back is “really inefficient”. The dosing would be amazingly hard to get right, as would doing it without someone noticing for the several seconds it takes to press the plunger on the syringe. The idea that it’s widespread is incredibly unlikely.

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But there are claims, meanwhile, of an “epidemic” of drink spiking. There’s certainly been an increase in the number of cases reported — Harry Sumnall, a professor of substance use at Liverpool John Moores University, says that the number of police-reported incidents has gone up from about 150 in 2006 to 500-600 a year more recently. Of course, that’s not the same as the actual act becoming more common.

Academics and experts I have spoken to are all careful to say that it is important to listen when people say they’ve been drugged. But it’s also important to remember that people’s subjective experiences are not always reliable. As Paul North, a former drug treatment worker and the director of non-profit advocacy organisation Volteface, told me, there are a huge number of anecdotal reports. But it’s really hard to get any data.

So, you can record the number of people who think they’ve been spiked — about 5% of victims of rape and sexual assault think they were drugged, as Sumnall points out. But we know from every other area of psychological science that self-reported data is really unreliable. Ivan Ezquerra-Romano, co-founder and director of the social enterprise Drugs And Me, is also doing a PhD in cognitive psychology, and he says “self-report is something that we as psychologists try to run away from”.

There are a few studies that take toxicology samples from people who come to A&E reporting that they have been spiked, but not very many. Those that do exist tend to find little evidence of drugging. This one from 2007, for instance, sampled the blood and/or urine of 75 suspected spiking cases. They found unexplained drugs (that is, drugs the patient denied taking) in eight of the samples; three of them were cannabis and three were MDMA. GHB and benzodiazepines were each found in one. The report concluded that the use of sedatives to spike drinks “​​may not be as common as reported in the mainstream media”.

A more recent review of the literature, which looks at a variety of studies from around the world, found similar results. It concluded that drink-spiking “appears to be an un-common occurrence in drug facilitated sexual assault”. “In the majority of cases that get investigated, the substances are impossible to detect,” says Giulia Zampini, a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Greenwich.

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There are possible explanations for this, of course. One is that GHB, in particular, is very quickly metabolised, especially if authorities are slow to take samples; so perhaps there’s under-reporting of spiking incidents. But equally, as an academic I spoke to pointed out, sometimes it’s easier to say – to the police, or one’s parents or employers – that you were drugged than that you took drugs recreationally.

This doesn’t mean that “drug-facilitated sexual assault” isn’t a real and widespread problem. It’s just that on the whole, the people — the, let’s face it, men — who are doing it don’t need to use fancy drugs, and don’t need to slip it into a stranger’s drink in a nightclub. The focus on one particular archetype of “spiking” — the stranger slipping a clear liquid into a woman’s drink in a club, as in the BBC drama I May Destroy You — distracts from a more complex social problem.

“The stranger-danger archetype is very rare,” says Zampini. “In every aspect of rape and sexual assault, it is much more common in an environment where there’s a relationship of some kind.”

And in most cases of drug-facilitated sexual assault, the drug is alcohol. Sometimes it’s the perpetrator buying stronger drinks than the victim expected — a double instead of a single, say. Sometimes it’s that the victim voluntarily drinks more than they are able to handle, and the perpetrator then takes advantage. “There’s a lack of recognition of how vulnerable alcohol can make you, if consumed in large quantities,” says Zampini. “And there is a dangerous binge drinking culture in universities — drinking is down compared to past generations, but still prevalent. And people can confuse the effects of alcohol with other drugs.”

But as North and Zampini say, the important thing is the intent to harm, not the particular drug used to do it. If a man buys a woman drinks with the intent of getting her too drunk to consent, or takes advantage of a woman who is already too drunk to consent, that’s just as bad as slipping illicit drugs into her drinks.

The concern is that, in a rush to be seen to be doing something, authorities and nightclubs might start cracking down on drugs — more CCTV, more searches at the door. “These tougher responses don’t work,” Zampini says. “If people want to sneak drugs into clubs they’ll do so.” What should be happening — and pleasingly is happening — is a focus on protecting people rather than cracking down on drugs. “There have been some recent good steps that have been taken in providing harm reduction,” says Zampini: things like identifying harassers on the dance floor, and throwing them out, rather than throwing out people for “taking half a pill”.

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Even if drugs were eliminated, as long as there’s a binge-drinking culture in UK universities, drug-facilitated sexual assault will remain a risk. Spiking probably isn’t a major driver of it — although Ezquerra —Romano notes that on the gay scene, where GHB and GBL are used recreationally for chemsex, it’s more likely, because the drugs are widely available. But in the university-nightclub scenario that most of the recent media attention has been on, alcohol is probably the main cause.

We can’t blame victims, but we shouldn’t be reluctant to suggest measures to protect themselves. “There’s nothing wrong with encouraging people to take steps to ensure their own safety,” Zampini says. “But the onus of responsibility shouldn’t be on women. Otherwise it’s like the old idea of women dressing provocatively and asking for it.” So the authorities need to facilitate those steps. For instance: if we’re going to say to women that they should cover their drinks, then clubs should provide lids.

And it’s worth getting better data on drink spiking, in case it’s more common than we think. That’s something Ezquerra-Romano is working on: for instance, he suggests drug vapes that record the amount you’ve taken via a smartphone app, so that if you do a blood test later you can compare the expected blood concentration for the amount you’ve taken with what is actually found. (Existing “colour dye” tests for spiking drugs are “worse than useless,” in Sumnall’s experience.)

But it’s more likely that drink spiking is rare, focused on by the media because the narrative is simple: the innocent victim and the calculating, predatory stranger. I worry (and everybody I spoke to for this piece agreed) that focusing on these sympathetic but unrepresentative cases is a bad idea. A woman who gets drunk voluntarily is just as much a victim, if a man takes advantage of her, as is someone who is drugged. It’s not that drink-spiking victims are the “real”, or the virtuous, ones.

The Nineties-era HIV scare died away. But fascinatingly, the recent surge in “jabbing” scare stories has revived it: false stories of young women infected by HIV in UK cities have been circulating alongside the drug-scare ones. Those stories we know are untrue; I suspect that drink-spiking is real, but rare. But it’s definitely true that men take advantage of drunk women. That’s just as bad, and far more common. Creating extra reasons for women to feel afraid does not seem wise.

Nothing about Matt Hancock has previously suggested a man of untrammelled sensuality. And yet there he is, getting deeply into a clinch with his aide Gina Coladangelo during office hours. Is this really the same Matt Hancock we once saw clumsily attempting parkour, jumping over small obstacles with an expression of fierce determination? The Matt Hancock who appeared, inexplicably, to conduct his early-pandemic video interviews from a small, red cupboard? Matt Hancock, the objectively ridiculous person, destroyed by passion?

Even his scandals had a vibe of hapless enthusiasm rather than malice. Buying £30m of PPE from a man with no prior experience making medical equipment who used to run his local? Breaking the ministerial code by giving an NHS contract to his family (and failing to declare his own interest in the firm)? Official business done from his private email? You can imagine Hancock sealing the deals with the same nod of unguarded satisfaction that he gives after vaulting a very low wall: another problem surmounted by Matt Hancock!

When Dominic Cummings published a text from Boris Johnson calling Hancock “totally fucking hopeless”, no one really cared because it’s what most people thought anyway.

Bafflingly, he survived it all. And it seems possible that he might even have survived this latest humiliation if it hadn’t seemed so disconcertingly off-brand: Hancock, after all, was the sex stasi of the pandemic. When Professor Neil Fergusson was busted in an assignation with a woman during lockdown, Hancock primly commented that the social distancing rules “are there for everyone”, and called for Ferguson to be investigated by police. And while families were missing the funerals of their loved ones, Hancock was having his knee-trembler against an office door.

Boris would have let him off. How could he do otherwise? The Prime Minister’s uncounted children and multiple acts of callousness to wives and lovers leave no mark with the public because this is what we expect: no matter what he promised his women, he never promised us that he would be anything other than a cad. But the public didn’t feel the same about the Health Secretary; Hancock’s hypocrisy couldn’t be borne.

The affair itself is another matter. There is a current culture of increasing permissiveness which led even the Bishop of Manchester, to say that he was “more worried about the fact that he failed to keep the social distancing than I am about the fact that here was a middle aged bloke having a bit of a fling.” Clearly, it’s something a lot of people do. And despite reigning stereotypes of hapless horndog husbands, the data increasingly suggests that adultery is committed just as regularly by women as it is for men. (Hancock’s affair partner is married too.)

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Women might actually be the ones with the greatest incentive to cheat: in her 2018 book Untrue, the writer Wednesday Martin pointed out that it’s women who experience the greatest dissatisfaction in long-term relationships, and women whose libidos are most likely to tank within monogamy. (Hence the rumoured condition of “Lesbian Bed Death” in long-term relationships between women.)

This makes an obvious kind of sense if you think about it for any amount of time at all. The legal and social structures that govern our relationships are, after all, patriarchal: products of male power, and so unlikely to reflect women’s own interests. In Martin’s argument, when straight relationships have an imbalance between a male partner who wants more sex and a female partner who wants to be left alone, it’s not because the woman is innately less frisky. She’s just bored off her tits.

This current upswing of tolerance for adultery is probably partly a result of feminism successfully unpicking some of the double standards against female sexuality, and partly a result of the internet eroding the distinction between “thinking” and “doing”. Thanks to Facebook messenger, you don’t even need to bother to book a hotel room to put on the scarlet letter in your own lunch hour.

More importantly, there’s not that much to be afraid of these days. (Or at least, there wasn’t until early 2020.) Antiretrovirals mean AIDs is no longer a hateful reaper scything after desire, and antibiotics are holding out — just about, for now — against the rest of the STDs. Modern contraception is a reliable guard against pregnancy.

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Advice columnist Dan Savage advances a “monogamish” approach, where each partner makes room for each other’s foibles rather than enforcing a doctrinaire version of absolute fidelity; the psychotherapist Esther Perel, in her book The State of Affairs, eloquently argues that unfaithfulness isn’t always a comment on the relationship itself. People in “good” relationships cheat, and sometimes “good” people become cheaters. “The victim of the affair is not always the victim of the marriage,” she has written.

Still, affairs do have victims, as Savage and Perel would agree. In Nora Ephron’s novel Heartburn, published in 1983, narrator Rachel has discovered that her husband is having an affair. “When something like this happens,” she explains, “you suddenly have no sense of reality at all. You have lost a piece of your past. The infidelity itself is small potatoes compared to the low-level brain damage that results when a whole chunk of your life turns out to be different from what you thought it was.”

The pain of being cheated on is the pain of realising your most intimate life has been a fiction authored on someone else’s terms. A friend of mine, currently writing a memoir about being married to a serially unfaithful man, sees the propensity to cheat as a matter of character: “Surely that’s the most important context in which you’re truthful — to the person that you lie nose-to-nose with in bed. If you can’t be truthful to them, then you’re absolutely not going to be truthful in any other context.”

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But besides the deceit, what runs through the account of Hancock’s actions is the casual carelessness about his wife’s feelings. It’s reported that he woke their eight-year-old child to say he was leaving the family home — and then, presumably, left his wife Martha to deal with the children’s distress as well as her own shock. In his letter of resignation, he says sorry to his “family and loved ones”, but never directly to Martha, who surely after 15 years of marriage deserved a personal apology for the public devastation of her life.

There are even “friends” of Hancock briefing that the relationship with Coladengelo is a “love match”. It’s one kind of lapse to cheat, and perhaps it’s another to get caught, but to lack even the belated discretion to grant some dignity to the person you hurt — the person who in this case had your children, supported your career, and who you once promised to forsake all others for — seems a gratuitous kind of cruelty. Hancock may well be besotted with Coladengelo, but he seems to have fallen at least as hard for the myth of his own romantic exceptionalism.

There is nothing special about adulterers. All hearts are messy implements, all desire is untidy, all people are capable of hurting those who love them and being hurt in turn. One of the unedifying things about the orgy of moralism towards MPs in the Nineties was that the journalists indulging in it belonged to an industry that was hardly known for its sexual rectitude. But coronavirus made private lives into a matter of policy, and Hancock was the most enthusiastic advocate of all for this. His failure to apply that to himself is, in the end, the thing that makes him most ridiculous of all.

Should Ritchie Tozer be worried about his health? No, he says, because the information circulating about this virus is bunk. He calls out a list of rum-sounding aetiologies. Some people think it’s caused by sniffing poppers; others that it arrived from outer space on a comet. It could’ve come from God, or the jungle, or a secret laboratory, or Russia. Captions in the chunky Ceefax font fill the screen with the crowning absurdity: “Homosexuals, haemophiliacs, Haitians.” How, asks Ritchie, can anyone believe in the reality of a disease that only affects groups of people that begin with the letter H? And off he goes, careering around the room, kissing every man he passes.

Ritchie is the protagonist of Russell T Davies’s new Channel Four drama, It’s a Sin, which airs tonight at 9pm. The show assembles a rich and sweet assortment of young and optimistic friends in 1980s London, and then subjects them to the ordeals of the AIDS crisis. Being the work of the screenwriter and producer who regenerated Doctor Who, created Queer as Folk, and cast Ben Whishaw and Hugh Grant as Norman Scott and Jeremy Thorpe, it is a thing of passion and mischief and wit. Davies is a writer in the tradition of Victoria Wood and Tony Warren, creator of Coronation Street. In 1960, Ena Sharples demanded, “are them fancies fresh?” In 1999, a character in Queer as Folk — played by a Corrie alumnus — reported on the events of the night: “It was as big as a baby’s arm.” Same kind of humour, different object.

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Davies’s work also expresses a coherent political view: critical of the state but supportive of liberal institutions. The characters of his recent dystopian drama Years and Years knew that their lives were becoming less dystopian when the populist Prime Minister was packed off to jail and the BBC restored to public ownership. In his 2009 Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood: Children of Earth, aliens arrive and insist that humanity hands over 10% of its children. (Young humans, it transpires, are prized for their narcotic properties: the aliens intend to smoke them like joints, and consider it payback for having saved 25 million people from a virulent strain of flu.) Davies takes us into a cabinet meeting in which ministers and special advisers are discussing how to comply with this demand. They order up the OFSTED reports and decide to sacrifice kids from schools with the poorest exam results: “Those destined to spend a lifetime on benefits, occupying places on the dole queue and, frankly, the prisons.”

It’s a Sin has similar points to make. A powerful subplot focuses on a mother who is forced to take her local authority to court to release her sick son from an isolation ward. It’s based on a real case. But as well as obliging us to recall these little-known injustices, the series also gives two other spurs to measure the distance between the present and the past. And they are related.

The first is all the sex. Russell T Davies is good at sex. It’s a subject from which many of his contemporaries seem surprisingly disengaged. In modern free-to-view drama, morgue scenes outnumber bedroom scenes. I haven’t kept a precise tally, but I think that in the last five years I’ve seen fewer orgasms on television than scenes in which characters demonstrate their sadness by lying very still under the bathwater. This was not true of the small-screen culture that formed Russell T Davies and his peers. In the 1970s and 80s, we watched Sheila White’s Messalina hold a marathon orgy in I, Claudius (1976) and Jack Shepherd and Cheri Lunghi pursuing topless conversations about the future of socialism in Bill Brand (1976). We watched Michael Gambon in The Singing Detective (1985), warding off an unwelcome erection with thoughts of Ludovic Kennedy, and, in a less classifiable human act, Bob Peck’s policeman hero in Edge of Darkness (1985) disbursing a grief-stricken kiss to a vibrator he finds among this daughter’s personal effects. Another thing: we watched these scenes with our parents, and survived.

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In Davies’s work, sex is rarely the destination of the story, or a secret that the plot works to expose. It attends the lives of his characters, and accompanies them through the narrative. In Queer as Folk, the hero takes a phone call from the hospital while in bed with a scandalously younger partner: he discovers he’s become a sperm-donor dad just as the teenager reaches his climax. In Years and Years, a breathless and passionate scene occurs in a Portakabin between a housing officer (Russell Tovey) and a Ukrainian refugee (Maxim Baldry), as the other characters are absorbing the news that a nuclear bomb has been detonated in the South China Sea. The two men kiss like there’s no tomorrow, and perhaps there isn’t.

It’s a Sin has another sequence to add to this canon, in which Ritchie (Olly Alexander) has sex with eight men in two minutes as the soundtrack thrums to Hooked on Classics, the gloriously naff Royal Philharmonic disco medley. He experiences something intense and upright with a shock-haired boy in the back room of a pub (to Beethoven’s Ninth); is fellated in his student accommodation (Rossini’s William Tell Overture); fucked against a wall (Marriage of Figaro); has a vigorous threesome by his desk (Fantasy Overture from Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet); throws a long-haired drama student down on the bed (Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 16); and whoops with his legs over the shoulders of a barman with blue eye shadow (Bizet’s March of the Toreadors). And though we know that this story is about contagion and illness and death, Davies declines to rob his characters of their pleasure. The premise of his title is always resisted.

Davies has been gathering his energies to dramatise the 1980s AIDS crisis for more than a decade. It’s pure coincidence that filming had just concluded when Covid-19 entered our lives. But this unsought resonance is now one of its strongest attractions. There are scenes in which characters maintain their distance to avoid infection; scenes of anxious deep-cleaning. A memorable moment puts a young character in pale green PPE as he visits a friend on an isolation ward. On set he must have looked like a visiting alien. On broadcast he’ll just look like somebody in Sainsbury’s. He wonders why he needs a mask. “It’s to protect me, not you, idiot,” says his friend, anticipating one of the commonest exchanges of the last ten months.

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And here’s where the series makes its most electric contact with our own moment. It takes pains to track the progress of good, imperfect and downright false intelligence about the AIDS virus through the information networks of the day. The materials may be pre-digital, but the mixture of evolving research, muddled government messaging, ignorant press commentary and outlandish conspiracy theory will be queasily familiar.

Weird though many of them sound, the mess of theories that makes Ritchie deny the seriousness of the AIDS virus are all lifted straight from the historical record. If TV dramas had footnotes — and these days there’s no reason why they couldn’t — then they would have been easy to supply. Ritchie’s list of H-words loomed in the frame of Killer in the Village, a 1983 edition of the BBC2 science series Horizon — which also featured an earnest Manhattan doctor sorting through bottles of amyl nitrate, and calling out their proprietary names: Locker Room, Bolt, Hardware, Thrust. His mention of a secret laboratory memorialises Operation Infektion, a Kremlin disinformation campaign that sought to spread the idea that AIDS was a bioweapon that escaped from a US military research centre.

And that barmy idea about AIDS arriving from space, like a problem from Quatermass? Detailed on the pages of the Daily Telegraph in December 1986 by the astronomer Fred Hoyle and the biologist Chandra Wickramasinghe. “We think it most likely in each instance primary entry was secured through infected rainwater entering lesions in feet in the mainly barefoot populations of the Third World with subsequent transmissions proceeding through human contact.” Today Professor Wickramasinghe is the head of the Centre for Astrobiology at the privately-run Buckingham University. Any future drama about the Covid years will have its choice of similarly cranky characters and ideas.

Should Davies get credit for this historical accident? I think he should. Some writers create stories that are closed and self-contained. Others make work that lets in the audience and their own experiences. He does the latter. It’s a Sin has a quality in common which much of the best art. A glorious promiscuity.

When the ZANU leader achieved power in Zimbabwe in 1980, the average life expectancy was just under 60. By 2006, when Mugabe had been ruling – or immiserating – that land for a little over a quarter of a century, he had achieved something that was, in its own way, remarkable. For now, Zimbabwean life expectancy was down to 37 for men and 34 for women. Indeed, the situation was so bad that average life expectancy for women had fallen by two years in just two years.

That statistic within a statistic is worth dwelling on. With a greater or lesser degree of acceptance, all human beings understand that every year we live is one year closer to the grave. But Zimbabwean women in the era of Mugabe weren’t just heading at the normal human pace towards the terrible silence, because at the time same they were moving towards it, it was moving towards them at the same speed. (By way of contrast, in Kenya during that same period, life expectancy increased 10 years in a decade, so that in 2013, the average Kenyan was no nearer to death than he had been in 2003.)

There were two reasons why the citizens of Zimbabwe found themselves in such a dreadful situation. The first was the dire economic system that Mugabe oversaw, one of incompetence, corruption and grand-scale theft that turned one of the breadbaskets of Africa into a basket case. Hyper-inflation was just one consequence, but for the average Zimbabwean this translated into food shortages, medical shortages and eventually shortages of just about everything.

The other nightmare unleashed on the Zimbabwean people was Aids. The scourge, which had affected every country in sub-Saharan Africa, rode through Zimbabwe with especial ease because it was helped along by what might be regarded as the precise opposite of a public information campaign.

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Indeed, the Mugabe government’s attitude towards the pandemic might more correctly be described as a public disinformation campaign. It was designed to keep the general public not just in ignorance but actively misinformed about the way in which the virus is transmitted, how irreversible it then was after infection, and how it could best be avoided.

Again, Zimbabwean women were at the forefront of this scourge, being more likely than men to catch the virus. The ignorance that Mugabe promoted, and his reluctance to accept outside intervention to deal with the crisis, was another singular part of his legacy.

So there, in a single statistic, is the total life achievement of Robert Mugabe. At a time when living standards around the world were rising, when hundreds of millions of people were being raised out of extreme poverty and life expectancy was slowly rising, Mugabe managed to rob the average Zimbabwean woman of half her life. And this man, whose miserable achievement on earth might be summed up in that fact, has died – presumably as peacefully as his looted wealth allowed him to die – at the age of 95, in a private hospital in Singapore.

Zimbabwe has spent this past decade trying to find its way back from the brink, but the lesson of Mugabe’s life is precisely the inverse of the motivational instructions that most school children learn. If it is true that one person can make a difference, that one person can do an almost untold amount of good for the world if they put their mind to it, then the opposite is also true. The force of one wicked or evil individual can be enough to create an almost unimaginable amount of harm.

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And while Mugabe, during his interminable presidency, presented the ruin of Zimbabwe either as some unavoidable fact, or the consequence of the wicked former colonialist power, so he managed only to demonstrate the fact that if the country had ended up in other hands – literally almost any other hands – the results could at the very least not have been worse.

Now that he is no longer with us, perhaps it is also worth reflecting on what lessons there are outside of Zimbabwe for how to deal with a figure like Mugabe. It is true that, for Britain, in particular, the relationship was a complicated one. Even low-level forms of soft-diplomatic pressure, such as throwing Zimbabwe out of the Commonwealth, could be portrayed domestically as the former colonial rulers attempting to impose themselves once more. The history of the post-colonial period is no longer anywhere near being fully written, but when it is, we will need to ask how the likes of Mugabe (not that there were many like him) were able to get away with things simply by dint of not being European.

Almost every part of the leeway Mugabe was able to exercise – promiscuously at the start of his rule, though with diminishing returns towards its close – was predicated on that one simple fact: that he was not the colonial power. There is something to be said for the attitude, of course, but it is clear that the pendulum had swung too far.

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In his memoir Gentle Regrets, the philosopher Roger Scruton recalls an occasion in 1985 when he was due to speak at Glasgow University. Various student organisations had found out that Scruton was a conservative, and specifically the then editor and publisher of the conservative journal The Salisbury Review, and so he was, not for the first or last time, subjected to a no-platforming at the university. And, by his own account, as Scruton wandered forlorn around the university grounds as his hosts tried to find a room anywhere on or off campus where they might safely hold his talk, he had the opportunity to watch a bit of Glasgow university pomp — a ceremonial procession in session to bestow the honour of an honorary degree on (Dr) Robert Mugabe.

It is easy at times like this to pass around photographs of the Queen and various British prime ministers with Mugabe, as though having to meet them in the course of official duties in any way suggested that any or all of them approved of him. But much more telling is that small vignette from Glasgow University 30 years ago, because, of course, the University did not have to meet Mugabe nor honour him, a man already responsible for a brutal massacre by this point. They chose to.

And in a snippet like that, one gets a glimpse of the larger question that will at some point have to be addressed: how Robert Mugabe was able to die so close to his centenary when his sole legacy on earth was stopping millions of his own people from reaching a third of that age.