Gregg Wallace is a working-class hypocrite Posh women are victimising the celebrity chef

“I’ll munch the living daylights out of your little tart.” It’s the sort of thing a woman might expect from the local park-bench drunk, not a BBC star paid £400,000 a year. Yet that’s exactly the remark Katy Brand received while appearing on a 2013 episode of Celebrity MasterChef, after Gregg Wallace decided to test out his charm on the 45-year-old comedian.

Suspended and disgraced, the host’s future already seems in doubt, especially now that several other women have accused Wallace of unseemly sexual conduct. Yet if he’s since apologised, albeit partially, what’s striking is less his vulgarity — and more the eagerness of powerful men to blame women for their own misconduct, relying on cynical class justifications as they go.

Though the scandal is only a few days old, it seems clear that Wallace has form in the crassness department. Quite apart from the “tart” innuendo, 13 other people have accused him of inappropriate behaviour, including senior BBC presenter Kirsty Wark. At one point, Wallace allegedly talked openly about his sex life. Elsewhere, he apparently took his top off in front of a female worker, saying he wanted to “give her a fashion show”.

Wallace’s conduct for other channels is also being scrutinised. During the filming of one Channel 5 series, a female co-worker claims he often made inappropriate sexual comments, including discussing spanking and domination.

These allegations aren’t exactly surprising. If true, Wallace would only be the latest male celebrity to treat female colleagues with disdain. Yet whatever the truth — and investigations have been launched — I’m most struck by his defence. “In the newspapers, I can see the complaints coming from a handful of middle-class women of a certain age, just from Celebrity MasterChef,” is how he put it on Instagram. “This isn’t right.”

And though he’s since abandoned that line, Wallace’s apology for the apology doesn’t feel much better. “I wasn’t in a good head space when I posted it,” he said of the original video. “I’ve been under a huge amount of stress, a lot of emotion, I felt very alone, under siege, yesterday, when I posted it.”

It’s clear, at any rate, that Wallace basically sees himself not as an abuser, but as an innocent victim. He isn’t alone either. “Fuck it, someone has to say it,” intervened proud anti-feminist Brendan O’Neill. “There has been more liberal media fury over Gregg Wallace telling Kirsty Wark a dirty joke than there ever was over the years-long violation of white working-class girls by grooming gangs.”

Beyond the self-pitying tone, what unites both Wallace and O’Neill is their reference to class. Wallace, certainly, has always liked to portray himself as a man of the people, a cheeky chappy from Peckham who left school at 15. No less striking, the presenter has often played up this disreputable image. He’s freely admitted to “clumping” people: in 2013, around the same time as the infamous “tart” comment, he punched a man for allegedly touching his girlfriend.

Whatever the truth to this self-image, at any rate, Wallace’s insinuation is that posh women are victimising salt-of-the-earth men. This is classic divide and rule, and God knows Britain has enough class anxiety (and sexism) that it may convince some. “It either didn’t happen or was harmless bants,” is how one male poster put it, even as another dismissed the “old-aged women” just looking for attention.

The truth, though, is that while Wallace may wallow in his Freddie Starr shtick, it’s a style that was already going out of fashion 40 years ago. That Wallace could make lazy jokes about women as late as 2014, when he claimed MasterChef was a job that “requires” a male host, says much more about him than his accusers.

If, moreover, Wallace’s class-bound defence is part of a long tradition of male chauvinism — that women should just smile more; that they should revel in the winks and the wolf whistles — the final implication is just as insidious: that sexual harassment is either enjoyable for the women targeted, or else it simply never happened to start with. If you don’t laugh, or brush it off, you’re a prude. If you complain, you’re a ball-breaking bitch. Either way, the offending man is never to blame.

There’s one last irony here too. Quite aside from the terrible pressure on women to force out a rictus smile whenever some dinosaur makes a nudge-nudge-wink-wink joke, transgressing a boundary and violating their self-worth, Wallace’s class defence just doesn’t work on its own terms.

Yes, a few of Wallace’s accusers are “middle class” — not, of course, that that matters. But others, young women in junior positions, certainly aren’t, especially compared to the man himself. Let me put it differently. Who, in the end, has more power: a veteran male presenter earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, or a female colleague on a zero-hours contract and no job security? Faced with these plain economic facts, that Gregg Wallace drops his aitches becomes utterly irrelevant.

To be fair, and whatever he’s finally found to have done, Wallace never tried to hide who he was. Others likely did: including the executives who tolerated his behaviour for so long. Hopefully, now, the days when sexual misconduct could be dismissed by a bit of harmless banter are coming to an end.

Until that day finally arrives, expect the usual defences to be wheeled out. But if some desperate man asks what the world is coming to, beg them to reflect on who the victims really are — regardless of how they speak or where they went to school.

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Julie Bindel is an investigative journalist, author, and feminist campaigner. Her latest book is Feminism for Women: The Real Route to Liberation. She also writes on Substack.

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