A year on, there’s already a depressing familiarity to the #MeToo cycle. First comes the revelation. Then days of salacious headlines. Then the moment of reckoning: a powerful man either loses his job. Or he doesn’t. And on we go until it all happens again. When #MeToo first exploded, I shared the optimism about its capacity to create change: not just for the victims of the rich and famous, but also for those whose transgressions are never going to be newsworthy. Today I’m much warier.

It’s undoubtedly satisfying seeing some big cheeses get their richly deserved comeuppance, but it has its limits. Sometimes a genuine expression of remorse and a promise to do better might be preferable. And the very thing that has made #MeToo impactful – its short-circuiting of the due process that has failed women for decades – was only ever going to work against a handful of predators, in part because the more revelations that emerge, the more they lose their capacity to shock. But also because exposing a few famous men for what they are is probably not the most effective way of reshaping what men can and can’t get away with in workplaces far from the media glare.

There isn’t some utilitarian calculus that means abuse gets outranked by other considerations

That’s not the only thing holding back the movement. In recent months, it’s become clear that people who are no allies of #MeToo are all too keen to marshal it for their own ends. We’ve seen that happening in the US, where alt-right bloggers have pledged to use it to bring down liberal opponents of Trump. And we’ve seen it here, where John Bercow’s longstanding critics have used serious (and as yet uninvestigated) allegations of bullying against him and findings that the House of Commons – of which he is chief officer – has a toxic culture of bullying and harassment to call for his resignation.

In theory, there’s no problem. Who cares what’s motivating someone else? Judge each case on its merits. But it matters psychologically: the bandwagon-jumping morphs the debate so it’s no longer about what happened to the alleged victims but about something else altogether. It pushes people into ignoring the transgressions of their allies out of distaste at the prospect of lining up alongside their foes.

That way lies hypocrisy. And if by any chance you think it is limited to one side – Republican senator Susan Collins casting her swing vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the supreme court after delivering an impassioned speech on why #MeToo is long overdue – think again. Two weeks ago, Hillary Clinton – she of the “I’m with her” slogan – was questioned on whether her husband should have stood down over his affair with Monica Lewinsky. No one was expecting a yes. But this self-professed feminist, the first major-party female candidate for US president, couldn’t even rouse a “no comment”. Instead she defended the indefensible, perpetuating the myth that it’s OK for the most powerful man in the world to accept oral sex from his intern in the Oval Office, because it was “consensual”.

It would be unfair to single out Clinton. The Labour party – the clue’s in the name: it’s there to champion workers – has utterly failed to hold Bercow to account for his leadership of the Commons. A Labour MP, Kate Green, cast the deciding vote to block an investigation into the allegations that he subjected some of his staff to severe bullying, leaving one suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder – accusations that he denies. In a recent Commons debate about bullying and harassment in parliament, Labour MPs had the gall to accuse Bercow’s critics of bullying him. And what a great takeaway for abusers this was, from the veteran Labour campaigner Margaret Beckett. In defending Bercow’s position, she said “abuse is terrible”, but that Brexit “trumps bad behaviour”.

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You can’t (rightly) pooh-pooh Brett Kavanaugh for wheeling out irrelevant character witnesses (would-be rapists aren’t necessarily awful to all the women in their lives) and then proclaim: “But John Bercow’s been such a great reformer!” There isn’t some utilitarian calculus that means abuse gets outranked by other considerations. And it’s wrong to call out the hypocrisy of others without confronting your own cognitive dissonance about friends who may also be bullies and harassers.

So long as we judge the predators we like differently, we’re all, to some extent, complicit. Only when people feel able to call out those they like and love will we see progress. If not, we’ll at best be stuck in a holding pattern of revelation then resignation for years to come. At worst, #MeToo will be discredited through its capture by those who don’t give two hoots about what it stands for, so long as they can use it to take down their supposed enemies.

• Sonia Sodha is chief leader writer at the Observer and deputy opinion editor at the Guardian