Why does Gregg Wallace believe he’s the real victim?

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0:53That's Greg Wallace. And this week, 50 more people have come forward to complain about his sexual behaviour on that job he put so much into as host of Masterchef. He's now trying to charge 200 quid a session to talk about wellness and mental health. This from a man who has had his friends say to the newspapers today, the reason he did what he did was because of his autism, he couldn't wear underpants. He's trying to paint himself as the victim in all of this. Does this withstand even the most basic scrutiny? Welcome to The News Agents.

1:36The News Agents. It's John. It's Emily. But before we go any further, it's maybe best to spool back a little bit to before Greg Wallace discovered wellness and was the host of MasterChef and these complaints were made about him.

1:57Gregg Wallace:I came into the studio and was like, oh hi Greg, I've got something for you. And he said, oh, is it a present for my cock? Greg Wallace came in and launched into a soliloquy, essentially a story of a sexually inappropriate nature about his, well now, former wife. And I was really shocked. I most definitely was witness and victim to some of the bullying and harassment behaviour of Greg Wallace. And unfortunately a lot of those involved in the production team were also witness to that. I could feel him touching me around my backside. I got into the car and then every time he was changing the gear stick, he would just give my thigh a rub or the knee.

2:48Gregg Wallace:I kind of looked up and then he dropped the towel. He was there with his wife, I think she might have been his girlfriend. She left the room and he made a comment about what they did in the bedroom. I'm not going to repeat the comment, but I was very shocked. I blushed to the roots of my hair. I was so shocked. I actually stopped. I was walking across the studio and I stopped right in my tracks and I felt like I wanted the ground to swallow me up. He used his position of power to, who I believe intimidate and cause distress. The fly in the ointment on occasion was Greg Wallace. Well, last November, Greg Wallace stepped back from presenting the cooking show MasterChef after accusations of the kind you've just heard from many contestants and from staff who'd worked on the show that he had been making these kind of sexual comments over the last 17 years.

3:43and this week reports have been surfacing that he has now been fired by the BBC. We should say that an investigation commissioned by Banerjee, which is the production company that makes MasterChef, has been conducted and we think that that is due to report next week. But Greg Wallace has already, if you like, tried to get on the front foot. He's tried to get ahead of the news cycle and he says he's already been cleared of the most serious and sensational accusations against him and that the kind of complaints that are carrying weight are now just about inappropriate language from 2005 to 2018.

4:22And as you've been saying, he has doubled down on this. And instead of, I guess, stepping back to pause upon some of the complaints that those people, those women have been making, he's now decided that it is basically all the fault of his former employer, the BBC, for knowing that he was autistic, neurologically diverse and not doing anything to protect him. It's worth reading the statement Greg Wallace issued this week when the story emerged that he'd been fired. Honestly, it is a classic of the genre where you are accused of things, yet you somehow construe it that you yourself are the victim.

5:07of everything that's happened. I mean, I think it's almost the definition of narcissism, that it's all about me rather than it's all about the victims. This is his statement. I was hired by the BBC and MasterChef as the cheeky greengrocer, a real person with warmth, character, rough edges and all. For over two decades, that authenticity was part of the brand. Now, in a sanitised world, that same personality is seen as a problem. Now we get to the bit. 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.

5:53That failure is now being quietly buried. So it's all the BBC's fault. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so deeply offensive. Deeply offensive to autistic people. Deeply offensive to people who have neurological disorders and struggle every single day to try and operate in a confusing working world. And deeply offensive to all those who've come forward who've said, do you know what? We tried to raise the alert on this man years ago, in some cases decades ago, and nothing was done. And I got in touch with a few of the people who have either appeared on Mars Sheffield, worked around Greg Wallace to try and work out what they made of these most recent comments.

6:33One person said it's a nasty business, actually told me it was far too upsetting to go back into it. They didn't want to come on air and reopen the wounds. But they said, I don't believe those claims for a minute. He's giving autism a bad name. But then this person said something that sort of did stop me in my tracks. And they said, I don't understand why the producers knew what he was like and didn't appear to do anything to change his behaviour. So either they were colluding with him because they liked his so-called cheeky, chappy persona, or he was completely out of control and they just couldn't stop him.

7:08And this person said, no one is holding the producers to account. It's always the talent that gets the blame. Don't get me wrong. He was utterly obnoxious. But how come he was allowed to be that obnoxious and for so long? Which I guess goes back to your question about the sort of cheeky chappy click stuff, which is, did he create a sort of aura around him whereby those who'd hired him in the first place thought that that kind of language, you know, was funny or it was cute or it appealed to a demographic that the BBC didn't appeal to enough and that they kind of encouraged it in him. You know, where did this autism diagnosis come from?

7:45I mean, he says it was very recent, but I think there will be people who have lived and struggled and tried so hard to even hold down a job with autism, who are now sort of thinking, how on earth do you get away with dropping your trousers, talking about your cock and then blaming your neurological diversity, you know, that people would have the chance to earn the money you'd done in a job you'd done and get away with that behaviour for so long is absolutely sickening. So I posted about it on X this morning and Nikki Clark, who is, I think, a fan of the podcast and follows me on X as well, wrote back and said, I'm autistic, John.

8:25This sort of nonsensical defence is both insulting and stigmatising for a demographic of people who already take a disproportionately large share of bullying and abuse. He needs to own his actions and choices and so do his friends. and there's just one other aspect of it it's the idea that TV is full of these middle class Oxbridge types who want oh let's get a nice working class chappy in and we'll put up with what he does the idea that because you may be from a different background that you think it's okay to behave appallingly I think is bullshit and insulting I think that the idea that somehow oh well working class people behave differently because they're cheeky chappies, they know the difference between right and wrong.

9:12There's no doubt on which side of the line Greg Wallace's behaviour falls. It is the wrong side of the line. Now, sure, is there a complicity that takes place in TV? If you're a big talent and you're getting big ratings and the show is making your production company large amounts of money and they're a bit off colour, you think, oh God, I'd rather not know about it. I think that environment has changed. I think the Me Too movement, I think what was acceptable as behaviour a few years ago simply isn't today. The other thing that Greg was... I don't know if that's true. I mean, one thing I would say, and I should say we've reached out to Banerjee, the production company.

9:52We haven't heard back from them. Presumably they're going to hold their tongue until their actual report comes out, which is underwritten by an independent law firm to hear their version of events. But one thing I'd say is that when somebody is successful, they rarely get brought down. It's only when something... I mean, with Harvey Weinstein, obviously, I'm in no way comparing Greg Wallace and Harvey Weinstein. But I'm just talking about people who are sort of seen as being at the top of their game. They're untouchable until something happens that makes them slightly more vulnerable, like a movie flop, like having a professional failure, which sometimes opens the door for people to kind of go, OK, we'll look at this again.

10:31I mean, quite often, money does the talking in all these jobs. So yes and no. So, I mean, I didn't think we'd be talking about this, but if you look at the sacking of Christian Horner, the F1 boss at Red Bull, I mean, there were all sorts of complaints about him sexting and whatever else. And it wasn't the Me Too movement that brought him down. It wasn't the Me Too movement. It was that Red Bull wasn't doing that well. Exactly right. But there are other people who we know, who we've talked about on this podcast, Hugh Edwards and the like, who were at the top of their game and were brought down because it suddenly became impossible to defend behaviour.

11:05And Greg Wallace was still rating highly. So it's not that. It's that people can complain now, will complain. And rightly, this behaviour is not acceptable anymore. Yeah. I mean, I was speaking to the mother of an autistic child who said, you know, there is a huge difference between somebody who literally struggles to navigate the world and relationships and or make a living. and the mother said look this person may have autistic issues it is possible that they have autistic issues but honestly it's like the whole of britain has mental health problems nowadays and in fact it's only those with real fundamental issues who should be given help this person said you know i'm kind of fed up with everyone jumping on the bandwagon of what her son goes through every single day get over it you know exclamation mark exclamation mark and i do think there is sort of something happening here, which is more profound than even than the narcissism you described at the beginning.

12:01And that is a kind of a political opening for people like Greg Wallace, which is, you know, we've talked in the past about the sort of the Profumo response to scandal, haven't we? Where Profumo took himself off after his scandal, love child, for 30 years, he basically just devoted himself to the most menial of tasks in public service. and then he kind of came back to public life in a sort of almost like a Christian sort of renewal sense, didn't he? He was like, I've served my time in the wilderness, I'm back. Nowadays, I think there is this sense of just, if I don't accept the premise of what I've done, then I can become the victim.

12:41I can say that this is actually the whole world against me. I can use the whole political movement of grievance, which has been so successful, you know, in Magaland and Trumpland, and somehow make people feel, you know, whether it's about sort of, these women were after me. Remember, he made the claim last December, I think it was, about women. And apparently now, I'm reading in the paper, there's been 13 complaints in that time. Now, in the newspaper, I can see the complaints coming from a handful of middle-class women of a certain age just from Celebrity Masterchef. So the point he's making is that he'd worked with 4 ,000 contestants in his time and only a handful of them had complained and they were mostly middle-class women of a certain age.

13:35Something that Downing Street came out and said was bluntly misogynistic. He then wrote back from that and he apologised and he said he was in a bad headspace. I mean, I'm guessing he would be in a bad headspace. You know, he'd already been sort of retired from that series of MasterChef while they underwent an investigation. But there will be, I'm certain, a following for him. For the man who feels vilified by middle class women, for the man who has fallen the wrong side of woke, for the man who just thought he was hired as a cheeky chappy and suddenly finds himself on the wrong side of all this.

14:06Look, I'm watching your face now. You're horrified, right? No, I'm not horrified. I think there could have been a way back for Greg Wallace. had he not played it so freaking stupidly you know if he had just stuck to the sort of tried and trusted formula of oh everyone's such a snowflake now you can't say anything out of order otherwise the thought police come down on you and you're cancelled and that's what's wrong with this country today and we've got to be more robust and we've got to go back to being able to call something for what it is yeah what he's done i think with the line of telling friends I couldn't wear pants because of my autism I think it just becomes into the realms of parody and comedy and nobody is going to think, oh yeah.

14:51Yeah, he's tipped himself into woke nonsense category, right? So the people that would have said, oh, get over yourself we were just having a laugh you can either play the we were just having a laugh or you can play the I'm really suffering from my own neurological diversity I don't think you can do both and appeal to the same people who might have got you out of that hole. Look, maybe Greg Wallace is right and the manifestation of his autism is that he can't wear pants. But if that is the case, don't take your trousers down because that might just offend a few people. If you do that in a studio, in the green room, in wherever it happens to be in the television studio, it's not a good look.

15:34Not, as you say, a good look. Just to bring you the response from Patrick Holland, who is of the production company Banerjee. He said, we need to do all we can to ensure that everyone in production in the most junior roles feels confident to call out bad behaviour. And obviously, we're going to be able to look at their report in full, hopefully in the coming weeks. Yeah. And that's just a holding statement until they get this report, whenever it emerges. Yeah. We'll be back in a moment looking at the threat posed by Iran and whether they are as dangerous in Britain as Russia and China.

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17:09That's code IHEART at H-E-R-O dot C-O. All figures per serving of Hero Bread. See nutrition facts on Hero.co. This is The News Agents. A new report has been published today on the threat posed by Iran. It comes from the Intelligence and Security Committee, which has had confidential briefings about the state of play, presumably from the security services and from others. It follows on from a very rare public appearance by the Director General of MI5, who briefly came out of the shadows to warn about the dangers. This is Ken McCollum. Since January 2022, with police partners, we have responded to 20 Iran-backed plots presenting potentially lethal threats to British citizens and UK residents.

18:06As events unfold in the Middle East, we will give our fullest attention to the risk of an increase in or a broadening of Iranian state aggression here in the UK. Well, that was Ken McCullum, the Director General of MI5. And as I said in the introduction, a new report has come out from the Intelligence and Security Committee. And its chair is Kevin Jones, now the Right Honourable Lord Beamish. Thanks for being with us. Thanks, John. Were you alarmed at what you uncovered, discovered about what is happening with Iran on UK soil? Well, I think one of the main takes out is that I think we use the word that it's wide-ranging, persistent and unpredictable threat.

18:51And I think in terms of the threat to distance here, Israeli interests and the Jewish community, I think that hasn't had the spotlight that it should have had on it. But then there's obviously these cyber attacks and the wider disinformation campaigns which the Iranians use. Is this intensifying? Well, it's persistent. If you look at the Iranian regime, its main focus is its own survival. And it takes a very aggressive attitude against anyone who threatens that. So any dissidents, it's got a vitriolic, one of our witnesses said it's in their DNA in terms of the anti-Jewish and Israeli themes. and it's reckless in the sense that what they do is they copy what they do in the region in terms of they fund, for example, in the region proxies.

19:38They do the same thing in Europe. So increasingly what you're seeing is organised crime and other groups being used to target distance and sadly in both the Netherlands and in Turkey, four people have died at the hands not directly of the Iranians but of organised crime groups. In terms of the kind of crimes that are going on on British soil, I mean, how many of those, what percentage of those do you attribute now to the Iranian state or Iranian actors? From 2023 to 2024, there were 15 attacks that were actually thwarted by the Security Service. There's another, I think, five since. And the issue is here, it's not just the fact that they're targeting individuals, but it's complex in terms of the crossover into organised crime and other proxies makes it more difficult for the Security Service to identify the Iranian involvement, but it's a real threat.

20:33The other threat is actually to not just individuals in UK soil, but kidnap attempts that have been made of individuals who travel, for example, the Middle East and then are kidnapped or persuaded to go back to Iran. And in one very sad case, it was finally executed by the Iranian regime. Do you mean British people? British people or dual nationals, yes. We know about the couple who I think sort of ended up in Iran on the back of a motorbike adventure. And I mean, would you say no citizen should go to Iran? Well, the advice by the Foreign Office is very clear, especially dual nationals. It's not just about travelling to Iran.

21:08It's also travelling to countries in and around Iran, because there is evidence, for example, of the Iranians kidnapping people in Dubai and other places and transferring them to Iran. But you're not saying don't go to Dubai, right? No, not to go to Dubai. Well, for certain individuals, dual nationals or people who have criticised the regime who are distant, I think the advice strongly is not to because there is a threat to those individuals in and around the region. And here, what are you saying the government should be doing that it isn't right now? This report went up to 2023 and the reason why it's been delayed was because of the general election.

21:44What we found criticism was that the strategy was very short term. It's reacting firefighting rather than having a long-term strategy of how we counter Iran in both intelligence in terms of protecting individuals and broader policy. The present government will now respond to the report. So what we expect is to see how those various themes, and I think we described it as like a wire diagram of organisations, is streamlined and actually put in an action plan of how we can resist the constant threat from Iran. As part of this committee, you get access to MI5, presumably MI6, and they talk to you.

22:24Your committee gets the most detailed, confidential, top-secret information so you can prepare your reports. How would you characterise the view of the people at the top of MI5 and MI6 over this threat? Well, I think it was summed up very well by one of the agency heads who described it, that Iran, in terms of threat, compared to China and Russia, is in the top of the Championship League, not yet quite in the Premier League, but it's persistent. And I think what makes it more dangerous in some ways is that it's the unpredictability and its risk appetite to carry out attacks, which you possibly...

23:04So they're prepared to do more than, say, China or Russia would, because China and Russia would calibrate more carefully the diplomatic consequences. There's that, and also the fact that in terms of the Iranian regime is they don't perceive, for example, attacking individuals in the UK or Jewish interests here or Israeli interests here. Strange they don't see that as an attack on the UK. And the recklessness of some of these attacks, the concern I think that the committee has, and I think the security service share this, is collateral damage to this could be UK citizens as well. I guess the big question is whether you are advocating keeping diplomatic relations open with Iran.

23:41I mean, we've had a functioning embassy there, I think, until very recently. Or whether you say, we've got to start prescribing the IRCG, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, because we think of them essentially as a terrorist organisation. Do you think it's time to just say, we've got to prescribe this body? It's basically a militia army, isn't it? But it is part of the Iranian state. Yeah, it's not as simple as that. I mean, some of the experts we took evidence from were very opposed to it. One of them said it was tokenism rather than actual effect. But it's also more difficult in practice because the 2000 terrorism act, which the prescription legislation comes under, doesn't allow you to designate states as prescribed states.

24:23So there's a difficulty, which I think the present government are already looking at. The other issue, which I think you're right, Emily, is this trade-off between keeping diplomatic relations and taking this action. I mean, our embassy is shut now, is it? I think it is just at the moment, but I think there may be plans to reopen it. But the other issue there is a small quarter of the Iranian cabinet are members of the IGC. So how do you do that? And people compare us to America. The American legislation is very different. And you've got to actually say, well, what effect would that actually have in terms of countering the threat?

24:57In other words, if you're trying to get people to the table to discuss nuclear proliferation, or if you're trying to get people to the table to actually talk about a peace deal of sorts, you're not going to do that if you've already said they're all terrorists who can't talk to you. Well, that's the problem. And so therefore, I think some people take it as a view. Is it a simple yes, no, do you do it or don't you do it? I think there's a broader issues which aren't sometimes thought about. Iran, Tehran is hiring some South London gang or North London gang or whatever it happens to be to go and cause mayhem at Jewish or Israeli site or, you know, Iranian dissidents who presumably are the main target.

25:36of some of this stuff. I mean, we've just had a court case of a warehouse being torched by three guys who were paid a thousand quid to go and do it on behalf of the Wagner Group. Is this the new MO? Is this the new modus operandi for foreign states to subcontract out to low level criminals in the UK to do their dirty work? Well, you're right. It is a new threat and it's something that the Wagner Group and others have used. And if you look for that, for example, Nevada group case, is some of these individuals perhaps didn't even know what they were actually doing, who the actual money was coming from.

26:12But it's, again, it's part of the Iranian playbook, because what they can do is deny that they're involved in it. They do this across the Middle East, for example, by support for proxies like Hamas, Hezbollah and others. So, yeah, it's a way of trying to distance them. It is a challenge for security services, because it crosses from between not just intelligence, gathering and intelligence targeting, but over into the police and organised crime elements. That's why it's so important that I think we've got a better handle now of those two working together. Keir Starmer has seen your report. He said something about three weeks ago, which was that Britain needed to be on a war footing.

26:49It was a very strange sort of phrase that, because it sounded not just like he was talking about Ukraine or Russia or defence spending, but it sounded like he was saying this country should be preparing for war. I mean, what did you understand by that? I think what he's trying to do, which I agree with him, is the threats to the UK now, are they just in the old stage where you'd have state-on-state actors and state-on-state wars, in fact? It's not. It's multifaceted. So it's cyber, it's disinformation and it's persistent. That's the issue. So it does give challenges for any government or any nation to try and fight on all those different attacks.

27:34But it is, you know, the effect of which, for example, the nation states such as China, Russia and Iran are attacking our allies as well is quite intense. And it's certainly changed from what you call normal, what would be normal. You sound very calm about it but would you say that this is the greatest threat we've faced since the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War? Well, not from Iran, but I think combined the effort, yes, because what you're dealing with here, you've got a hot war, obviously, in Ukraine, but the way in which the Russians and others are, as I say, attacking on multiple fronts, and it's not always obvious that they're involved in some of this.