Begin on Oxford High Street, early on Saturday morning. On the steps of the Examination Schools three proctors’ officers or “bulldogs”, in the traditional black bowler hats, stand guard over the sleepy thoroughfare; for at ten o’clock the building opens for an election whose campaign has been turbulent.

“You here to break up fights?” I ask, cheekily. They nod. “Got razor blades in your hat brims?” “Madam, you go too far!” I adjourn to the coffee shop to wait: as a graduate I have a vote, but also a train to catch. At last the doors open and we four or five early birds troop in. Cue the magnificent red-robed figure of Pro-Vice-Chancellor Professor Roger Ainsworth, flanked by two proctors in crow-black. “The business before Convocation,” he announces, “is the election of a Professor of Poetry. Let voting commence.”

We all bow, more by instinct than instruction, and mark our X’s. There are only two candidates for the chair once held by Arnold, Auden and Heaney: Ruth Padel and Arvind Mehrotra. The frisson surrounding the election is because there was a third: the Nobel prize winner from St Lucia, Derek Walcott. But shortly before election day, John Walsh, of The Independent — unfortunately, a former friend of Padel — mischievously invoked the “troubling . . . shadows of sexual harassment allegations that swirled around him” during his US teaching career, and described him as “creepy” and unrepentant. Then some anonymous hand circulated the same allegations to various Oxford luminaries, and all hell broke loose.

Padel — whom I supported, because I think she will be active and interesting — says she has nothing to do with this. She condemns it as “cowardly and disgraceful” and I believe her. Apart from her character, it is just too unbelievably stupid a tactic. However, she has been pursued by journalists delighted at the idea of some feminist poets’ conspiracy, particularly in the aftermath of Carol Ann Duffy’s laureateship. She feels “tainted” and seriously upset.

Walcott himself grandly withdrew, alleging that the whole contest had become “a low and degrading attempt at character assassination”. In a shockingly nasty and potentially libellous line (if quoted accurately) a former postholder James Fenton describes Padel and Walsh as “this hypocritical duo [who] have kicked a 79-year-old poet in the slats . . . because he stood in the way of Padel’s ambitions”. Others gleefully disinterred an erotic poem of Padel’s, involving a kitchen table and a honey-glazed duck, which they believe refers to a long-ago fling with Walsh. With an extra delightful twist, the woman who sued Walcott over sexual harassment allegations in 1996 popped up to defend him.

Walcott’s supporters — in a line swallowed wholesale by idle media, including BBC News — took to describing the ex-candidate as having been “the front-runner”. In fact, with a potential electorate of hundreds of thousands (anyone willing to turn up on the day and prove they once got an Oxford degree) there was no opinion polling, thus nobody knows who was front-runner. Padel’s campaign was actually very strong and interesting, putting emphasis on her mission to unite literary and science departments: her great-great-grandfather was Charles Darwin, and her latest book is his biography in poems; she undertook to work with science undergraduates whether or not she was elected.

But the whole shenanigan made a group of academics supporting Walcott demand that the election be called off because there could now be “little pride and dignity” in any victory. One don says that a “vicious literary London coterie” has triumphed. The university took no notice of this demand, and Saturday’s votes (including 51 spoilt ballot papers) numbered 477. Padel is now the Professor of Poetry. Claims that the poll was “much lower than expected” are slightly startling, given that the last Poetry Prof election polled 531, and the one before, 451. It’s not the hottest of elections, even with added sex.

Well; it is not the first poetry row. Being good with words, poets have always done invective nicely, all the way from Martial’s “Non amo te, Sabidi” through Pope and Dryden to the moderns: Cyril Connolly called modern poets “jackals snarling over a dried-up well”. And we media love to join them. One newspaper leader concludes — again with an insinuation against poor Padel — that it is “never a good idea to get on the wrong side of a professional poet”.

But what strikes me most strongly is the streak of misogyny in much of the reporting — a misogyny that may even have fuelled the anonymous smear itself, in some conspiratorial hope to create a backlash rather than the own goal of Walcott’s withdrawal. The line you can clearly follow through it all goes as follows: “Women! Always grumbling about sexual harassment. They lead men on with their batting eyelashes and short skirts, and then grass them up and ruin their careers. Sometimes years later! They’re devious careerists, they’ll use any tactics. They’ll use their old boyfriends in the media, too, and then deny it. Hypocrites! Bitches! Trollops, with their erotic kitchen table romps! They won’t be happy till they’ve stolen chaps’ jobs, like being Poet Laureate and Professor of Poetry, and they don’t care how old and distinguished their rivals are, they do them over! Women! Don’t you hate them?”

Personally, I am not paranoid about misogyny and have often been reproved for failing to notice it in my own experience. But in this affair the reek is unmistakable: a sense of impotent male rage simmers through the attacks, and especially the journalistic harassment of Padel in the past week.

Conversely, nor do I think there is ever much point in disinterring ancient allegations of non-violent sexual advances and workplace passes from an age when these things were more tolerated. Given that figures such as Bill Clinton and John Prescott have recently survived revelations of “asymmetric” work relationships, the flouncing withdrawal of Walcott over one anonymous mailing seemed to me an overreaction on his part.

He would have been a worthy professor. So will Padel. She has already invited him to speak and read. But we will never know how the vote would have gone, and Padel must live with that. I daresay she’ll do so with grace: there are five years to demonstrate her commitment, and the university will get more value out of her than the three modestly paid lectures a year it asks for.

But what we do now know is that there endures, in many apparently civilised quarters, a simmering rage of misogyny and mistrust. Pity.

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