John Torode is the latest victim of the new racial hysteria

Underreact, then overreact. That seems to be the BBC’s playbook whenever it is confronted with yet another instance of internal alleged misbehaviour.

Take Gregg Wallace, dropped from MasterChef after a legal firm’s report substantiated 45 claims against him, primarily for being a tit on set, it seems – constantly making lewd and racially risqué comments.

Rather than nip this behaviour in the bud, rather than make clear that asking lesbians intrusive questions about their sex lives or doing comical Chinese accents isn’t really cricket at a 9am shoot, they let it run and run.

Now, the Beeb feels moved not only to sack him, but it also considered shelving the remaining episodes in which he appeared, disappearing him from our screens like a commissar who got on the wrong side of Stalin and had to be expunged from the official photos.

The overreaction continues, with John Torode now caught in the riptide stirred by Wallace’s sub-Benny Hill antics. Torode, Wallace’s co-presenter on MasterChef for 19 years, has now lost his job, too, over a single allegation of ‘racial language’ in the same report.

‘Surely he said something really awful?’, you might be thinking. It’s impossible to say. Not least because the BBC is refusing to elaborate, with director-general Tim Davie saying only that it was a ‘serious racist term which does not get to be acceptable in any way shape or form’.

For his part, Torode says he has no recollection of the incident, suspects it never happened, and says the person he was speaking with when he used this allegedly despicable language ‘did not believe that it was intended in a malicious way’ and he ‘apologised immediately after’.

So vague is this complaint that the report cannot even pin it down to a precise year, let alone a precise date, claiming the incident took place sometime in 2018 or 2019. Unsurprisingly, Torode is now lawyering up.

Does anyone really think – based on this nonexistent ‘evidence’ alone – that Torode is a sinister racist, unworthy of his licence-fee-funded perch? Does anyone really care what a TV presenter may or may not have said, reportedly in a social setting, six or seven years ago? Does anyone really believe it is right and just that a man’s reputation can be sullied over a lone, potentially misremembered, encounter?

I’d bet vanishingly few do. And yet in this era of racial hysteria we are forced to live in a world of bad faith, in which the rules have been rewritten by the most easily offended and cynical among us.

Indeed, many cancellations aren’t even about the alleged offence itself. I’d wager Torode would still be in a job had the BBC not been desperate to appear belatedly decisive after Gregg-gate, and desperate to deflect from its big problem where racism is concerned – anti-Semitism – with the Glastonbury horror fresh in many minds.

While it feels like we are past the peak of the years-long #MeToo-to-BLM witch-hunt, in which the cancellations came thick and fast and over increasingly trivial ‘transgressions’ – it lives on, institutionalised.

If this were only true in media and entertainment, where the public spotlight burns bright and trigger-happy PRs determine stars’ fates, that would be bad enough. No one should be subjected to this microscopic level of scrutiny, where even unguarded conversations can damn you.

But it continues to percolate through society, too. There was the Lloyds Bank manager sacked for quoting the word ‘nigger’ during an anti-racism session. (Carl Borg-Neal was asking how he should handle a situation in which black staff used the slur to refer to one another.) Or the train conductor sacked for joking about the pub-closing lockdown ‘caliphate’.

Both men eventually won unfair-dismissal claims, but after months and even years of a dark cloud hanging over their reputations and finances. Employment tribunals continue to digest the slew of cases produced from 2020 on, the year the world went mad on several fronts.

This is a social catastrophe. We’ve unthinkingly ushered in a twitchy, cruel New Normal in which any stray comment can and will be used against you – particularly if someone, somewhere, has an axe to grind.

It also trivialises racism – reducing it to unintended, or even nonexistent, slights, half-remembered and wrenched out of context. All while leaving racism’s very real remnants shamefully unaddressed.

If the BBC wants us to believe it is serious about tackling genuine prejudice, maybe it should work out why its staff thought nothing of beaming Bob Vylan’s Jew-killing chants into millions of homes on a sunny Saturday afternoon, and leave poor old John Torode alone.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater