Vile Wallace gets well-deserved comeuppance after dropping his trousers once too often

SLEAZY: Wallace is the subject of complaints from 50 more women

The golden rule among television executives is: Don’t upset The Talent.

TV stars are hard to find and have to be kept sweet. So they are indulged, their egos gently stroked, their every whim pandered to.

This helps to explain how an oafish sex pest such as Gregg Wallace was able to keep his job as a MasterChef presenter for so long.

He has gone now, sacked after 50 more women came forward to accuse him of sleazy behaviour and back up allegations in a BBC news investigation last November.

His accusers then included Vanessa Feltz, Kirstie Allsopp and Rod Stewart’s wife, Penny Lancaster.

One woman complained to one of Wallace’s TV bosses about his behaviour and was told: “Well, you’re over 16 and he’s hardly Jimmy Savile, is he?”

I have written here before that Wallace was boorish rather than dangerous but some of the latest allegations suggest  that I might have been wrong.

He is accused of groping, dropping his trousers to expose himself to women, cracking coarse jokes in sexualised language. Okay, not quite Savile, but still vile.

Now the former greengrocer, who was a kind of bluff everyman, a counterpoint to the expert chefs such as Marcus Wareing and John Torode whom he presented with, has said he will not go quietly.

He accuses the BBC of poor journalism in its exposé and has apologised for inappropriate humour and bad language. And, in a last desperate, retch-inducing move, he casts himself as a victim.

“My neurodiversity, now formally diagnosed as autism, was suspected and discussed by colleagues across countless seasons of MasterChef.

“Yet nothing was done to investigate my disability or protect me from what I now realise was a dangerous environment for over 20 years.”

I’ve never worked in television but like many journalists, I have brushed up against it once or twice.

I saw enough to know that people should be wary of appearing on it. The first order of business, as writer and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain once said, is not to make you look good.

But if you bring in viewers, boost ratings, if you are perceived to have the X factor that will make them money, TV execs will act as your close protection team, turning a blind eye to your worst excesses.

They did it for Savile, they did it for Rolf Harris, they did it for Huw Edwards. It might turn out that they also covered up for Russell Brand, who has denied charges of rape and sexual assault.

The whole culture of TV is minging. But occasionally someone comes along to balance the scales. Step forward tousle-haired Essex boy Jamie Oliver, MBE, who is as impervious to scandal as his Teflon-coated pans are to burnt-on grease.

He is a genuinely nice bloke, a natural in front of the cameras and seemingly unaffected by fame. Oliver’s books sell like jam roly-poly at a school fête.

He is also a restaurateur, a campaigner for healthy food and lately for those, like him, who suffer from dyslexia.

He was discovered by TV producer Patricia Llewellyn working as a sous chef at the top Italian restaurant the River Café, in Hammersmith, West London.

She launched Oliver as The Naked Chef and if you go back to those programmes, it is Llewellyn whom you can hear off-camera asking questions that draw a frequently cheeky response in his usual estuarial English.

Llewellyn, who died aged 55 in 2017 of cancer, also launched the TV careers of Gordon Ramsay and the Two Fat Ladies while she was boss of the production company Optomen.

I wonder what her protégé Oliver would make of Wallace’s downfall.

*****

The Sunday news agenda unveils itself with all the slow seductiveness of a burlesque stripper.

The elbow-length silk gloves are peeled off, one finger at a time, on Tuesday and by Saturday night it is wiggling offstage with a coy backward glance and a saucy grin.

Few stories make it into a second week. But the fiasco of Labour’s welfare reforms is the gift that can’t stop giving. Literally.

First we had the revolt by a huge number of Labour MPs against Keir Starmer’s move to cut Personal Independence Payments.

With all the political instinct of a gerbil, he failed to see it coming. Then he failed to quell it with threats that rebels would not be considered for ministerial posts.

Finally, he caved in, making concessions that rendered his Bill useless. It was meant to save the Exchequer £5 billion. In fact, it cut the welfare bill by precisely nowt.

That was on Tuesday of last week. By Wednesday, at Prime Minister’s Questions, he was refusing to confirm that his Chancellor Rachel Reeves would remain in post.

The poor woman sat behind him wiping tears from her cheeks, which guaranteed her Page One picture coverage the length and breadth of Fleet Street.

It also prompted acres of speculation in print on how long the Son of a Toolmaker, with a personal approval rating of -43 per cent (yes, minus), could last as Prime Minister.

Finally, this week we got to the crux of the matter. If the hapless Starmer can’t cut welfare, how exactly is he going to save money?

And save it he must. Or raise taxes. Labour is spending faster than an oligarch’s mistress. There’s nothing left in the kitty.

The Office for Budget Responsibility warned this week that Government borrowing has reached 94 per cent of GDP, the value of everything we make in a financial year.

Meanwhile, the tax burden under the Tories and now Labour has risen from 33 per cent of GDP to 38 per cent, a “historically unprecedented” increase.

Those of us who lived through the Seventies are familiar with the triumph of hope over experience that constitutes Labour policy in times of trouble.

Yesterday at PMQs, Starmer insisted he would stand by Labour’s election pledge not to raise income tax, VAT or National Insurance on employees.

But he refused to rule out continuing the freeze on tax thresholds, which have drawn more people into paying income tax.

Neil Kinnock, who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in the 1992 General Election, advocates a wealth tax on assets worth more than £10 million.

That wouldn’t hit many of us and those it did hit would soon be seen disappearing over the horizon heading for more sympathetic shores.

They’re even coming for the cash in your pension fund.

Starmer knows that the reforms put forward by Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall last week were essential. Welfare is out of control.

The costs are spiralling and we cannot afford to chuck more and more money at people who can’t or won’t work.

Starmer failed to see the revolt coming because, to him, the reforms made perfect sense. He had cast a lawyer’s eye over them and concluded that only a fool would oppose them.

I wonder sometimes whether this country is becoming ungovernable. The electorate has become so entitled that anyone who tries to take away its privileges – from the bus pass to the National Health Service – risks political oblivion.

Starmer’s backbenchers have put him in a straitjacket. The way things are going, a padded cell is the next stop.

*****

Piers Morgan, former Daily Mirror editor, has given a vainglorious interview to the Sunday Times.

He ticks off the reporter William Turvill for having called him a TV presenter in a previous column. He now identifies as a “YouTuber”.

Morgan bought the rights to his show, Piers Morgan Uncensored, from Rupert Murdoch and put it on the internet platform, where he has four million subscribers.

How’s it going? “Great,” he says. “I’m having great fun running my own train set. Because I’ve never done that before; I’ve run it for other people.”

Morgan talks of expanding the show, creating others, “having my own little media network”.

The man with the biggest ego in Fleet Street adds: “I’m probably the best-known journalist in the world right now. I can’t think of anyone who really comes close globally.”

I can. Surely the name on everyone’s lips is Lord Drone?

RICHARD DISMORE

10 July 2025