In my other life as a theatre critic, I encounter some bizarre behaviour in the stalls. A couple of years ago, the issue getting my goat was a trend among some audience members to whip out knitting needles.
I have severe dyspraxia, which can make me sensitive to distractions, and hyper-sensitive to sound. A couple of years back – after sitting through the clacking and flashing silver gleams of a knitting session so extreme that a performer acquaintance in the show even texted me in the interval to say it was putting her off – I had the nerve to point this out to the malefactor sitting next to me.
His response? He “needed” to knit. He had ADHD, and found knitting a soothing exercise. His ADHD diagnosis, he insisted, trumped my dyspraxia diagnosis – and even the actor’s need for basic respect.
Life in modern Britain sometimes seems to constitute an ongoing battle of protected characteristics. This week, I thought back to my theatrical spat while I watched Gregg Wallace roll out a series of excuses for his conduct as host of BBC’s MasterChef. The Wallace saga has all the ingredients for a classic competition of entitlements and grievances: neurodiversity, the eternal battle of working-class man and middle-class woman, and an Englishman’s inalienable right to wear a sock on his penis like a tea-cosy for his todger.
On Monday, law firm Lewis Silkin released a summary of an independent report that substantiated 45 allegations against Wallace, mostly concerning “inappropriate sexual language and humour”, but also said to include racist comments, three counts of exposing himself to colleagues “in a state of undress”, and one of unwanted physical contact.
Reports like this are often released only as dry, euphemistic summaries, supposedly to prevent identification of the complainants. But previous claims in the press include the allegation that Wallace held the head of a female staff member while she knelt before him to wipe a stain from his trousers – he was the star, she was the junior who cleaned up mess on her knees – and thrust his groin at her, mimicking a demand for oral sex.
To some, this might look like banter. To most of us, it would be a clear abuse of power.
Wallace is still blaming everyone but himself. For the first time, he managed to push out a limited apology this week – apologising for “any distress caused” – while blindly insisting that “none of the serious allegations against me were upheld”. This is only true if you still don’t understand that humiliating your female and ethnic minority staff is a serious matter.
Last time this story was in the spotlight, Wallace notoriously attempted to present himself as a victim of class persecution and discrimination against men, falsely dismissing the allegations against him as coming from “a handful of middle-class women of a certain age”. He’s still banging the class war drum: “For a working-class man with a direct manner, modern broadcasting has become a dangerous place.” (Reminder: for his bravery in traversing this dangerous workplace, Wallace is reported to have been paid £400,000 a year.)
But now, his main line of defence is that “a late autism diagnosis”, which came during the investigation process, proves that Wallace, not his victims, deserves special protection. In an attempt to pre-empt the report last week, Wallace reportedly threatened to sue the BBC for discriminating against him on the grounds of disability – despite the fact that for most of his career, he had no autism diagnosis. This, too, is the BBC’s fault, because “nothing was done to investigate my disability or protect me from what I now realise was a dangerous environment for over 20 years”.
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Everyone accepts that Wallace now has a formal diagnosis of autism: the Lewis Silkin report acknowledges this. Autism can make it hard to read social situations. But it’s a funny type of autism that makes a TV star incapable of understanding social boundaries when they involve women, ethnic minorities, and those below him on the TV pecking order.
As the report notes of Wallace’s targets: “freelance staff in particular often felt unable to raise issues due to concerns of potential impact on future employment”. How lucky for autistic Gregg to hit on these people at random. Perhaps it’s simply a coincidence, too, that the other powerful man on MasterChef, co-presenter John Torode, was also found by this report to have used racist language (although he denies this) and has since been sacked too? Wallace’s autism may have made it harder to navigate social norms, but he enjoyed privileges in his workplace that he seems unable to acknowledge.
Unsurprisingly, disability and neurodiversity groups were the first to condemn Wallace’s excuses. There’s nothing more likely to provoke prejudice against neurodiverse people than a celebrity equating autism with an unstoppable urge to harass one’s colleagues. No wonder Emily Banks, founder of neurodiversity training body Enna, was quick to tell BBC News that autism “certainly doesn’t mean you can’t tell the difference between right and wrong”.
But this does come at a time of social tension: the rising rate of neurodiversity diagnoses coincideds with a competing moment of greater sensitivity to workplace behaviour. Wade through forums like Reddit’s “Am I The Asshole” or Mumsnet’s “Am I Being Unreasonable”, and you’ll find schoolgirls claiming to have been told at school that they have to put up with the advances of “creepy” boys because their classmate has an autism diagnosis. (Verifiable or not, such stories speak to a tension in the zeitgeist.) In at least two recent trials of young men convicted of harassment, an autism diagnosis has been offered in mitigation.
Where does this leave the rest of us? Some conservatives, Kemi Badenoch among them, will suggest that neurodiversity is simply over-diagnosed. This isn’t necessarily true: the fact that we’ve only now learnt how to identify a problem doesn’t mean it didn’t previously exist.
I have always found it helpful to think of neurodiversity as a useful tool for recognising one’s strengths and weaknesses, rather than a political identity or excuse for victimhood. I was diagnosed with a textbook case of dyspraxia as a child. It means, for example, that I struggle with spatial visualisation of scheduling, so I have customised ways of constructing a calendar. (The fact that I am able to employ a diary assistant for a few hours a week is undeniably an advantage.) Dyspraxia is also associated with poor timekeeping – but although I am indeed no star in this arena, it has never occurred to me to keep someone waiting, breeze in late, and suggest they should just put up with it. When your own weakness starts affecting other people, you tackle it.
In a widely-criticised essay last year, Badenoch said something similar, arguing “being diagnosed as neuro-diverse was once seen as helpful, as it meant you could understand your own brain, and so help you to deal with the world”. Her essay was muddled and often inaccurate, not least because she frequently lumped neurodiversity in with “mental health”. Nonetheless she grasped a key point.
As neurodiversity diagnoses soar, we have a choice: either we can all use our diagnoses to compete for special protections, the latest in modern society’s hierarchy of grievances, like Gregg Wallace, or we can all agree to learn better how to manage our strengths and weaknesses.
Reddit and Mumsnet are messy online forums for procrastination and drama, but there is one important lesson we can learn from them. Neurodiverse or neurotypical, whether you prefer to wield knitting needles in the theatre or an egg whisk in the TV studio, society depends on us regularly asking ourselves one question: “Am I the arsehole?”
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