The last time I took my wife to watch Millwall play a home game, a gentleman a few rows in front of us took grave exception to the behaviour of an opposing player and identified him, very loudly, as the author of The Critique of Pure Reason – repeatedly and with venom. Having vented his spleen, he turned to sit down and caught sight of my wife. An expression of contrition spread across his face and he said to me in a conciliatory tone: ‘I am very sorry for using such language in front of your lovely lady.’ The apology, you will note, was to me, not to my wife. Such is the arcane concept of chivalry and decent manly behaviour down The Den. I accepted his apology with a smile.
Trouble is, when you’re being cancelled, being absolutely right doesn’t help you
Why am I telling you this? Well, yesterday when I turned on the radio news, the third most important story was the declaration of martial law in South Korea in preparation for a third world war. The second most important story was the news that 20,000 economic migrants had arrived in this country via small boats since Labour took office – a large increase. And the top story was that a Millwall supporter had upset some women with a few ribald or coarse comments.
He did not go quite so far as Millwall fans go when they espy a female in the away end (I won’t tell you what they sing because you wouldn’t like it, but it is to the tune of ‘Cwm Rhondda’), nor even anything so brusque as the chant once directed at Paul Peschisolido, a Canadian footballer whose wife happens to be the entrepreneur Karren Brady. (‘You’re s*** and your wife’s a s***,’ since you asked.)
We can’t be sure exactly what this particular Millwall supporter said, because the women involved seem to have become all coy about the specifics. Kirsty Wark – sounding for all the world as if she were about to take up an appointment at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls – reported that the Millwall supporter had used ‘sexualised language’. Yikes. What that, Ed?
The Millwall supporter was a former grocer called Gregg Wallace, who co-presented a programme about cooking which I have never watched. Kirsty aside, I have never heard of any of the women who were so mortally offended. Whatever, Mr Wallace is now ‘SO over’, as my daughter might put it, given that everybody is piling on for their Ten Minutes Hate and there are demands to have MasterChef pulled from the schedules and for the footage of Wallace to be fed to ravenous rats.
Nobody dare say a word in his defence because that would expose them to the vituperation of the regiment of outraged women and they’d end up getting cancelled too. Giles Coren came close by saying that the BBC was pulling Wallace for being exactly what the corporation wanted in the first place – a grocer. Quite. Had the BBC decided to give the working-class thing a miss and appoint as co-presenter our own Charles Moore, or perhaps Alain de Botton, say, this business would never have happened. They wanted working-class ribaldry and sure enough they got it. Caveat emptor, etc.
The rather lovely, if she will excuse me for saying so, Celia Walden also came close by wondering what on earth Wallace had actually said, given just about the most specific complaint was that he had made some women feel ‘uncomfortable’, which she said was a vague term and possibly the new ‘toxic’. Again, quite right – but like a dog which has become habituated to the noise of a vacuum cleaner, perhaps Celia has become habituated to grotesque male behaviour as a consequence of living with Piers Morgan.
Wallace attempted to pour oil on the waters – and then set fire to the oil and threw some baby puffins into the resulting inferno – by insisting that he had offended only ‘middle-class women of a certain age’. I think it wasn’t very clever of Wallace to have said this, because it simply enraged the women all over again and he was forced, later, to apologise (which I wish he hadn’t done: never, ever, apologise if you think you are right. Have some guts). Clever or not, though, it was unquestionably totally accurate. The complainants were pretty much all middle-class women of a certain age. Trouble is, when you’re being cancelled, being absolutely right doesn’t help you. It usually just makes things even worse.
There is no rationality to these pile-ons – it is simply confected outrage and spite running rampant and in pragmatic terms the only way out of it is to issue a statement saying that you are having a mental breakdown and will be seeking medical help and my family would be grateful for some privacy at this very difficult time. That can sometimes shut them up for a bit. Although not for long.
I suspect we’ve seen the last of Wallace – which is no great loss for me but is probably a bit of a bugger for the man himself. The truth, I think, is that working-class behaviour is no longer tolerated in this country. I am aware that not all working-class people are as coarse as Wallace seems to have been, but there is a certain rough demotic with which the middle class have always felt a little uncomfortable – and as television is an almost exclusively middle-class occupation, there was always going to be trouble when a bona fide pleb was let in through the electric fence.
My real gripe is that the middle class have invaded what were once uniquely working-class pursuits and have, via the authorities, imposed their own buttock-clenched modes of behaviour. It is no longer quite so much fun going down The Den as it once was, knowing that the stewards are waiting to kick you out for making middle-class people feel uncomfortable. That was why we went in the first place.
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