Bin Gregg
This isn't about who presents a cookery programme, this is the future of politics
During the depths of the pandemic when everyone was going a bit mad a particular mania took hold in our household around the idea that Gregg Wallace lived in the bin at the end of our street.
One of the kids created an avatar in MarioCart called ‘BinGregg’.
Now, Gregg’s career appears to be in the bin.
Yet another creep found out and called out in a post MeToo world.
And yet.
One can’t help but feel that were we at the height of MeToo Wallace would be finished already. But he’s not.
Over a dozen women have made allegations about his behaviour. His lawyers have denied everything. And he’s come out swinging on social media.
That feels like the crucial difference between 2016 and now. This is a Trump/Reform world where men like Wallace feel like they can make their case and get a hearing. Allegations of disrespecting women do not lead to instant cancellation, instead they can actively attract an increasingly emboldened but ugly audience of men who (wrongly) feel hard done by.
Wallace’s case, as per his social media posts, is that his accusers are largely ‘middle class women of a certain age’. The reference to class implies this is simply an issue of translation, these women cannot comprehend his working class humour. It feels obvious to anyone with any working class roots that walking about naked but for a sock on your member - as Wallace is accused of doing - is not and never has been working class behaviour.
Bringing class into the equation also feels like an attempt - conscious or otherwise - to equate ‘working class’ with ‘macho or masculine’. That’s disingenuous at best. But it comes from a long tradition of trying to write women out of working class history. Women have always worked, working class women have worked yet their labour has been overlooked and undervalued and continues to be so. For a very clear example of that see how some key workers- doctors, teachers - were valued and spotlighted more than others - shop workers, delivery workers - during the Covid crisis.
The other part of his remarkable defence refers to the age of his accusers. As the BBC has made clear in their write up, the claims actually come from a range of women of different ages. And yet Wallace chooses to focus on those ‘of a certain age’. By which he really means post-menopausal. Again, the implication is that these women are uptight and undersexed. By making it about sex he gives the impression that everything comes back to sex with him. Which is not the defence he thinks it is when faced with allegations that in his behaviour and interactions everything comes back to sex with him.
Maybe he’s just a buffoon short of any self awareness. That is not an unreasonable assumption.
But it feels like more than coincidence that weeks after a man found guilty of sexual assault was returned to the White House, men like Wallace feel like that obnoxious and inappropriate behaviour is not a sackable offence.
Is Trump unique in being (apparently literally) bulletproof? He can say and do as he wishes and the same Americans who cite the nation’s origin story of casting off royal rule as justification for retaining the right to bear arms rush to give him the power and prerogative of a king.
What’s relevant here is the signal other men receive from the Trump example. Those with outsize egos, often fed by TV and social media but sometimes just on account of being male - remember the research that found a frightening number of random men thought they could take a point off Serena Williams at tennis - believe that they too can redraw or reinstate the boundaries of acceptable behaviour back to a time when the caprice of the contents of your pants determined the division of power.
Even if Wallace is binned off the BBC it’s likely there’ll be other channels waiting to woo him. Jeremy Clarkson punched a man and was pulled up by the Beeb for racist language yet has since had a couple of successful TV shows on Amazon and could lead famers protests with impunity last month.
Plenty of commentators are on the lookout for a UK version of Trump. A fairly low rent TV personality? A bit weird? A bit bulletproof? Wallace ticks the right boxes plus a final crucial qualification. If Kirsty Wark represents all that the metropolitan elite hold dear - integrity, education, professionalism, reason, character - to be on the other side of any dispute (details are immaterial) to her is to be in the right place as far as the populists are concerned.
The Gregg Wallace incident may feel like a celebrity story but its outcome will influence politics and politicians - the Reform crew in particular - into the future.