Yes, the problem is men like Gregg Wallace – but it’s also those who should stop them and don’t | Gaby Hinsliff

Agents, employers, board members all have a moral and legal duty to make people behave decently. If not now, when?

It was only a handful of “middle-class women of a certain age”. That’s how the MasterChef host Gregg Wallace originally dismissed his accusers, when allegations of sexually inappropriate behaviour first surfaced. Just a few humourless posh birds, in other words, who couldn’t take a joke from the self-styled “cheeky greengrocer” and star of a cookery show enjoyed by – well, lots of other middle-class women of a certain age, for starters.

But those jokes were apparently sexualised enough that the former Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark, no shrinking violet, raised concerns privately with producers after appearing as a contestant on Celebrity MasterChef. Meanwhile, her fellow broadcaster Kirstie Allsopp, who recalled Wallace allegedly describing a sex act with his partner within an hour of meeting her at work, succinctly described all the reasons women mostly didn’t say anything at the time: “Because you feel, in no particular order, embarrassed, a prude, shocked, waiting for a male colleague to call him out, not wanting to ‘rock the boat’, thinking it’s better to plough on with the day, assuming you misheard/misunderstood or just don’t get the joke.”

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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