Gregg Wallace and the revenge of the middle-class, middle-aged women

The response to the MasterChef presenter’s comments marks a turning point.

Gregg Wallace’s attempt to defend himself against allegations that he made sexually inappropriate comments to contestants on various TV programmes, which he denies, has not gone to plan. Over the weekend, the MasterChef presenter said to his 200,000 followers on Instagram: “I can see the complaints coming from a handful of middle-class women of a certain age.” The Prime Minister has since waded in: “Clearly the comments [from Wallace] that we’ve seen from the individual over the weekend were completely inappropriate, misogynistic.”

Wallace’s further attempts at self-defence appear rather flimsy. He had worked with more than 4,000 contestants, he said, but “apparently” there’d been “13 complaints in that time”. Although Wallace today apologised for “any offence” that he caused, his statement is illuminating.

It confirms what so many “middle-class women of a certain age” have been saying for years, none more eloquently than Victoria Smith in her book Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women. Older men are allowed to age gracefully, branded silver foxes, their on-screen wives and partners have to be 20 years their junior. The middle-aged woman is washed-up. She has nothing of worth to say. She has earned the title of “Karen”. And Wallace has gone one better, narrowing his comments to middle-aged women of a certain class only.

The women who have made allegations against Wallace may well all be middle class, and middle-aged – we don’t know. But the TV director and producer Dawn Elrick has told Sky News that several female production staff complained to her about Wallace’s conduct, and that she passed these on in a letter to the BBC. TV is an “insecure industry” as presenter Kirsty Wark said, and perhaps the runners, producers, camera crew all with rents and mortgages felt they couldn’t speak out. “My livelihood didn’t depend on my being on MasterChef, but the livelihood of a lot of people working in that programme did”, she said.

Instead of deriding middle-class, middle-aged women, society has much to be grateful to them for. “It’s our duty” to speak out, Labour peer (and, dare I say, middle-class woman of a certain age) Harriet Harman has said. “Older, middle class women [are] more able to challenge than freelance junior women,” she added.

They – we – are not afraid to question men who push the boundaries in the workplace. Younger women – and those like me in their forties – have benefited enormously from the fights previous generations of women have had before. We should thank them for that, not hold them in contempt. “To discount older women is, if you’re female, to write off your future self,” the New Statesman’s Rachel Cooke has written. Where would we be, she asks, without the Abortion Act, the Equal Pay Act, and the women who “struggled to make sure their daughters might have all the things they were denied themselves”?

If there is anything positive to come out of the allegations against Wallace, and his response to them, it’s that this may mark a turning point in how wider society comes to view older women. Women and men have turned Wallace’s response into something positive and powerful. “Today, we are ALL middle-class woman of a certain age,” writer Armando Iannucci posted on social media. “It’s not often that the internet gets behind middle-class middle-aged women these days,” wrote the comedian David Baddiel, “but thanks to Gregg Wallace for making it happen.” Time and time again, older women have shown themselves to be the backbone of society. Just as the hashtag has trended on social media, maybe now it will be become trendy to value these women. T-shirts bearing “#middleclasswomanofacertainage” could be this year’s surprise Christmas stocking hit.

Perhaps. If so, this woman of a certain age will be pleased. But women have earned the right to be sceptical. Smith, the Hags author, said: “Just as long as tomorrow, when there’s no opportunity for men to play themselves off against Gregg Wallace, actual middle-class, middle-aged women don’t revert back to being seen as Karens, whose complaints are unkind/ pearl-clutching/ shrill/ exclusionary/ trivial/ uncool.”