Although it has been widely reported in India, there has been strangely little notice paid here to the downfall of one of the most bizarre figures ever to have paraded across the world stage. After two years of police investigation into charges of sexual harassment of his employees, Dr Rajendra Pachauri has finally been removed from his position at the Energy and Resources Institute (Teri), formerly the Tata Energy Research Institute, which he ran for 35 years.

Plucked from obscurity in 2002 to become chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Pachauri was long hailed as one of the world’s leading climate experts, even though, as a former railway engineer, he had no qualifications in climate science whatsoever.