The atmosphere in parliament last week was so toxic, so noxious that I choked. In the past, I’ve been accused of wanting to murder people because I’ve used the phrase “stab in the back”. What can I say? Some people are stupid and disappointing. This time, I am speaking literally.

I arrived home after a longer-than-normal week away in Westminster. I walked to a restaurant where we planned to celebrate my son’s postponed ninth birthday dinner. I switched off my phone and greeted my family. In that moment of release, all of a sudden I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t focus and I was burning up. I fled and had to sit outside in the cold November night and try desperately to take in the air of my home town.

My week was not fun and before I dive into the detail of it I want to offer a disclaimer: I am not playing the victim. I am not a victim. I was not triggered. I am not a snowflake – I am an avalanche.

To the bystander, a steady stream of accusations popped up as the week unfolded. For me and a few others, it was constant. Like a patriarchal tinnitus. Almost all the allegations that hit the headlines, from my side at least, were as revelatory as the winner of this year’s Bake Off final.

People often say it is hard to get victims to come forward, but I have never found this to be the case. If you make yourself open, non-judgmental and if you know what you are talking about, people come and tell you when crap is happening to them. I have been lining up pro bono lawyers, making referrals, listening to stories, reading over statements, arranging meetings for disclosure, helping people to report into this or that process.

I have acted like a heavy and a nursemaid within the same half hour. Then, in a moment of quiet, I’d nip down from my office to grab a cup of tea and walk past some of the men I knew were lawyering up or trip over the chair of the man we all know had been sexting a teenager who came to him for a job.

There he was, keeping his diary appointments, while I cancelled all of mine to try to mop up their mess. His diary appointments were probably with fancy bloody businesses or, I don’t know, chats about how he’s hopeful he’ll still win beard of the year. I’m pleased he didn’t miss them; I am sorry to all those I cancelled. I am sorry to the victims of violence who needed help in my constituency office where I would normally be on a Thursday and Friday. I am sorry to the people whose emails I just haven’t got around to answering. Perhaps I’ll forward last week’s casework to Stephen Crabb for him to handle – he seems to be cracking on. But, then again, probably best not: I’m not sure the people with problem neighbours want bothering with sexts.

I suppose we can say one thing for the revelations so far – there seems to a grubby pairing system forming – one of ours lost the whip and so did one of theirs. So worry not, good people of the UK, the votes in parliament will remain the same.

Most of the men I saw around Westminster last week expressed solidarity and asked what they could do to help. Some have been a brilliant support, giving both space and, where it was needed, credibility to the women’s voices. Some of my colleagues – of both sexes and most parties – have, however, plumped for the subtle discrediting of the allegations. They have been acting out pantomime dame levels of pearl clutching: “Must we be locked away behind screens?” Or: “I’d pass you the milk, but I don’t want to be accused of invading your space.”

Then there is the “whataboutery” of people wanting an exhaustive list of exactly what is and isn’t acceptable. It’s as if every single public and voluntary sector employer in the land doesn’t already have a perfectly simple safeguarding policy in place. Where did these people come from? Add to this a layer of newspapers and pundits, shouting “hysteria” and “witch-hunt” and the inevitable Twitter propaganda bots, making out that caring about sexual harassment when it happens on your own side makes you a traitor ready for the gulag. Plus: the women telling us that a bit of knee touching should be dismissed and expected and we should jolly well toughen up. Bingo – you’ve got yourself a backlash. So boring in its predictability, so toxic in its effectiveness. But it wasn’t knee touching that did it for Michael Fallon was it? It was alleged sexual assault.

There was one positive to the week and that was sorority. It happened cross party, with Tory women ringing me up to express dismay and seeking help for their own woes. Others stepped up to cover things while I met victims or officials. The minister Anne Milton said from the dispatch box, in a timely debate on sexual harassment in our schools, that parliament “smelt of boys”. Theresa May missed a trick (which seems to be her party piece) when she picked her new chief whip. If there was ever a time she needed a woman such as Anne Milton cracking the whip, it is now.

That said, the women of the Labour party rocked last week. Without any need for co-ordination, a feminist sixth sense kicked in and we got it together. Bex Bailey’s alleged rape and the news of how the Labour party didn’t handle it stepped up our long battle to improve the sexual harassment policy in the party.

Last week, a group of Labour MPs, councillors and activists all spoke with one voice in our demands for a robust, independent system for handling sexual harassment. Never would one of us appear without pushing our goal. Stella Creasy, whose office is opposite mine, had a sort of WWF wrestling tag team thing going on. We would tag each other into the battle as we also tried to carry on with our actual jobs. She burst into my office at one point, when I was with some visitors, and we managed to have a whole campaign planning “conversation” without either of us actually speaking. Feminist semaphore or femaphore.

There was the sharing out, among many female MPs and the activists who were pushing with us, of the gruelling media rounds to get the message out and constant contact with the party, the leader’s office. Every evening, some emergency meeting; every late night, a conversation with one woman or another about what the next steps were for the following eight hours.

It felt like the politics and the practice I came into parliament for. Alas, it was in response to the politics and the practice I came in to stop. Reader, we won. See you this week for more of the same.