The first duty of a government is to protect its citizens – and ours is failing women. Every year, thousands of women and girls are being raped and subjected to horrendous assaults, with no realistic hope of ever seeing their attacker held to account.

A shocking new report has finally acknowledged this stark truth, admitting that ‘the number of rape allegations lost in the investigative process is damning’.

‘Damning’ is a strong word. It is contained in a report by HM Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate (HMCPSI), which is about as an official body as you can get. ‘If 58,657 allegations of rape were made in the year ending March 2019, but only 1,925 successful prosecutions for the offence followed, something must be wrong,’ it observes with a degree of understatement.

The report is the first product of an end-to-end review by a number of Government ministries and agencies, announced after a dramatic increase in the number of rape reports and a fall in the number being prosecuted.

The report echoes a great deal of what critics of the criminal justice system in Britain have been saying for years, highlighting the effect of chronic under-funding; almost 40 per cent of Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) lawyers who were interviewed for the report said that their caseload was "heavy and unmanageable."