Edward Erin, even down to his exotic name, hove into view like a character in a Georgette Heyer novel; one of those dashing, lean-jawed Regency cads dedicated to the pursuit of women, wine, gambling and two-in-hand carriage racing. It didn’t really matter whether it was the early 1800s or the early 2000s. The good doctor, found guilty of poisoning his mistress in an attempt to make her miscarry, inhabited a world of male supremacy untouched by 200 years of social enlightenment.

And what a wonderful life it was; what a fantasy existence as seen through men’s eyes. “I’m totally in awe of him,” said one of my more honest male colleagues yesterday. Status, wealth, prestige, looks, lifestyle: Erin had it all. He existed, it would appear, as the ultimate star in a movie entirely of his own directing.

For a start, he dressed the dream: an elegant and expensively dressed dandy, a sort of real-life Ralph Lauren model with his preppy university scarf and his velvet collars and brogues. You can bet the mirrors in his house were indeed well worn.

And as the most important person in Erin’s life was Erin, then everything he did was calculated to reinforce this. He married and had two children, but with a property empire and an accommodating wife, he was able to compartmentalise his family. His longstanding colleagues were unaware they existed.

He could also indulge his love of climbing and skiing. Ah, feel the glamour, boys! Taste the daring, intuitive nature of the off-piste black run and the icy overhang. For as real men know instinctively, it is by risking death that they come to appreciate life; and come to realise that they actually live while ordinary people — wives, children, poor people etc — only exist.

I daresay that in the Alps, when the sun glittered off Erin’s Oakleys, and his chiselled features were backlit by the snow, he was indeed “man in North Face catalogue”.

Now someone as perfectly cool, and coolly perfect, as this above all requires that people should tell him so daily. The gratitude of his patients was not enough. Erin was accordingly a serial womaniser. He had at least one longstanding affair with a colleague; his wife, who didn’t mind, revealed that there had been another; and his colleagues believe that there were more.

To juggle different women like this, while maintaining a family, even an understanding one, requires considerable organisational ability and a vibrant streak of opportunism. Erin had aptitude in spades. When one affair ended in October, he was only fallow for two months.

By the time of the hospital Christmas party, just two months later, he was fixed up again. His sexy blonde secretary, Bella Prowse, grabbed his hand and whispered: “Let’s have an affair.” Good heavens, wasn’t life sorted? Erin didn’t even have to bother chatting her up. And contraception? He assumed she was on the Pill. Why should he, a doctor, concern himself with these things?

All philanderers, however great their skills, trip up occasionally. Erin — wince for him, boys — mistakenly sent a text to one mistress instead of the other. It read: “Would you fly away somewhere nice for the weekend if you don’t do a locum?” When Bella queried him, he texted: “Sorry, not a girl, an old climbing friend from Wales . . . You can come too if you want.” As liars go, Erin wasn’t just good, he was awesome.

But then this delightfully self-centred paradise was threatened, wasn’t it, when the stupid woman got pregnant four weeks later. Everything Erin had worked for was going to be messed up because she was refusing to have an abortion. Why, she wasn’t even his main mistress; she was the one who started it and she wasn’t even on the Pill. Of course it was all her fault. As ever, he focused on the only person that mattered: himself. “I am in a very dark place, love. I want to die but that would be too selfish. I don’t know what to do. I’m not stable. I need help,” he told her. After being arrested, he told colleagues he had been “tricked” by a “mad woman”.

Women have spent the past century or so trying to get rid of men like Erin. We have, to a large extent, succeeded, in public at least. The question remains, however: is he a throwback, a solitary anachronism, which is why so many modern men are secretly enthralled with his shocking behaviour; or is he some poor, benighted fool unlucky enough to have been caught out doing what every man would still like to do?

It’s like the debate over political correctness. Have men changed? Or do we just pretend they have? It would be nice to think the default position of the majority has altered with regard to respecting women. Then again, the cynical among us know there are no guarantees that, without equality legislation, some men would not revert to drowning us in the witches’ chair for being mad enough to disagree with them.

Civilisation can be defined as the process by which a society protects the emotional and physical needs of women, rather than the right of men not to be found out. Men at their unreconstructed, arrogant, self-pitying, inadequate and ultimately risible worst don’t get this.

And you know the most amusing thing about Erin? He probably never will.

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