After more than a month of bitter debate, Sir Paul Nurse, the president of the Royal Society, tried to bring an end to the controversy over Sir Tim Hunt with almost as few words as it started.

“It became a complete Twitter and media storm,” he said firmly on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House. “He should never have been sacked by University College London.”

This was an extraordinary vindication for Sir Tim, and must have caused acute embarrassment to UCL. For weeks, all eyes had been focused on them. Would they do the right thing? It was after the Today show broadcast on June 10 that the establishment there had decided to make an example of the Nobel laureate who’d donated his time to their