In the Sex Kitchen

Today, I finally had confirmation that Masterchef presenter and sometime greengrocer Gregg Wallace is definitely a wrong 'un.  No, not because of the latest allegations concerning his inappropriate behaviour with various women, but because I saw that Rachel Johnson, self-styled journalist and sister of Britain's worst Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, was giving him her support.  The fact that she continues to defend her brother is not only evidence that she has no judgement, but also that she is consistently on the wrong side of history.  Any endorsement from Rachel Johnson is a sure sign that its recipient is some kind of morally degenerate bastard.  Wrong 'un though Wallace might be, I think that we're now nearing the stage in this scandal where we start running out of genuine allegations for the press to splash across their front pages and instead start turning to all those completely unattributed - not to mention utterly bizarre - allegations which inevitably spring up on social media.  They're, at best, speculation, at worst, just lies, which those spreading them try to give some minimal credence to by attributing them to 'a mate's second cousin's hairdresser' and the like.  I saw one the other day, claiming that, when Wallace had been recording and episode of In the Factory at the Nestle factory he was asked to leave and never come back, supposedly for being rude to someone on the Aero production line.  Which sounds vaguely plausible, but had absolutely no attribution.  Which is probably why it wasn't picked up by the media: too vague and unsensational.

Personally, I think that, in order to get some movement behind this rumour,  the person who came up with it should have gone the whole hog and claimed that Wallace was thrown out of the factory after farting in the Aero mix, claiming that he was demonstrating a novel way of getting the bubbles into the chocolate.  Not exactly plausible, but certainly sensational enough for the tabloids, especially if it allegedly came from a 'witness' who worked there.  I'm waiting for the claims going back to his days as a greengrocer, with disgruntled alleged customers complaining as to how he used to play practical jokes on them, like painting his cock and balls green, sticking them in his fruit and veg display and pretending that they were a marrow and two cantaloupes.  Or maybe recalling the time that he was caught in the store room with his pants down, shagging a life size sex doll that he'd made out of fruit. Then there are the bizarre sex games he doubtless allegedly indulged in, like that time he got that woman to strip naked and baste herself, before trying to shove her in the oven head first and take her from behind with a parsnip - telling her that he'd get her on Masterchef if she went along with it.  Not that I'm saying that Gregg Wallace has done any of these things, but I'm pretty sure that we'll variations on such claims in social media and maybe the tabloids as this business unfolds.  Because the trouble with sex scandals that involve (usually) male celebrities  abusing their positions with regard to women, while initially seeming exciting and juicy in a dark sort of way inevitably, as the details emerge, end up just being sordid and leaving you feeling dirty just by reading about them.  The media really wants outrageous sensation, which is why the made up allegations ultimately gain currency, (plus, because, at some level, we all know that they aren't really true, we know that nobody was really hurt).

Like all scandals, this Gregg Wallace business is a bandwagon that all manner of individuals will jump on in order to try and exploit in advance of their own agendas, with the actual victims in danger of becoming of secondary importance.  At the most basic level, they become fodder for those mobs who like to bellow their outrage about, well, something.  You know the sort, they turn up outside courts to shout abuse at suspects in rape and murder cases as they leave in a police van, regardless of whether they have any connection with the victims or not.  In the case of so called journalists like Rachel Johnson, they are just another battlefield in their tiresome 'culture wars', in which women who complain about being inappropriately touched or flashed at by a male TV personality are somehow overreacting as they have been infected by 'wokeness'.  It's all part of their contention that there's some kind of sliding scale for abuse, with lower level sexual harassment being seen as somehow harmless, just a bit of 'larking about'.  The perpetrator might be being a 'bit of a cock', or even an 'obnoxious dick', but still falls short of being a full on sex pest.  Which begs the question, of course, as to where the cut off point lies: at what point do the likes of Wallace cross the threshold from being 'annoying twat' to sex offender?  But hey, at this stage, it's still allegations and he's innocent until proven guilty.  Of sex offences, that is - he's always been guilty of being an pompous, pretentious and  irritating knob end.