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"Gregg Wallace’s autism means he can’t wear underwear, say friends

Sources close to ex-MasterChef presenter claim he has ‘hypersensitivity’ to tight clothing and his condition is partly to blame for his inappropriate behaviour" (£)

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/media/article/gregg-wallace-autism-hypersensitivity-claim-v72rmtmnv

Bollocks.
Loose fitting cotton boxers are older than him.
Disgusting that his "friends" and the Times would try that on.

Actually, an aversion to kinds and types of clothing IS a feature of autism. It's not ludicrous

This does not mean Wallace is innocent, but the claim is not intrinsically ridiculous. He is obviously autistic. Recall his "day in the life" article

So bloody what! Autism is not an excuse for predatory behaviour and sexual harassment. Nor are people with autism more likely to behave in such a way. It is disgusting the way he is trying to turn himself into a victim. He's no victim. Just a gropey entitled predator who won't take responsibility for his actions and was enabled by lots of others who turned a blind eye to his revolting behaviour. Good riddance.

A right old set too on the Loughborough Facebook pages. A couple of the balaclava clad bastard bike thieves have been named, shamed and threatened with broken legs.
To be fair, most of us knew at least their names, and it turns out I went to school with one of their grandparents. He was a tosser as well.
It's all kicking off, photos posted, addresses posted and the youngest (a 17 year old lad who apparently posts videos of his fuckaboutery and calls himself the TikTok Twokker) has run off to the Police because he fears for his life.
Mums and aunties are slagging each other off and I witnessed a bit of handbags this afternoon in town between two female middle aged druggie clan members who were jonesing too hard to make the blows count.
I'm hoping the resulting gang war takes out most of the Keats Way Massive.

The alarming aspect of this particular scandal is the corruption and deliberate misleading of our courts and the failure of the court system to spot it. This failure undermines the rule of law in a very serious way. If we can't rely on the courts to get to the truth who can we rely on?

That's my view but I, like @Cyclefree, am a lawyer so maybe that aspect is overly prominent in my mind and maybe non lawyers don't quite see it that way.

The story on Today this morning was mainly about the blood scandal but the description of how the compensatory schemes have completely failed to work was so similar that it was easy to get confused between the two. What is plainly required in both cases is immediate interim payments that are substantial enough to let people start re building their lives. If we end up slightly over paying in some cases that is simply too bad. I was shocked and appalled that the claims for the blood victims die with them, they do not form a part of their estate. And hundreds have died. It has been used before on this thread but for shame. For shame in our name.

Given how this scandal is so utterly dwarfed by other vaster scandals, I find it hard to get exercised by it. Indeed I have suspicions of those that do. This one is so much easier to take - the villains are nasty managers - so let’s make tv dramas about it and write 5000 word essays about it and ventilate about it endlessly

Rather than focusing on much greater and more troubling problems

In short: this is chaff

Talking bollocks again I see.

I have written quite a few headers on even more serious scandals and there have also been TV dramas about them and they share with this one the same essential elements which cause them to happen, to continue and to involve cruelty to the victims.

What I wrote here could and does apply to every other scandal. I am writing about it today because a report came out and to remind those with goldfish memories that nothing has changed. I have written in my book about Grenfell and blood contamination and many others and if I included every single scandal pointing out the depressing similarities it wouldn't be so much a book as a bloody enormous encyclopaedia - Cyclefree's Big Book of British Scandals.

The people mentioned in the case studies are not chaff. (The last time I heard that word used so dismissively it was by an MP in a Select Committee aimed at Dr David Kelly. He committed suicide shortly after.)

They are people like us. One of them is your age and at about the age you stopped taking drugs and turned your life around, he had a good business, a family and was looking forward to doing even better. Instead, he was wrongly convicted, had his reputation trashed, lost everything and has never been able to find employment again. He lives on charity from his family and friends. His name is Harjinder Butoy.

Don't you fucking dare call him and everyone like him and what happened to them all "chaff".

For shame, @Leon. For shame.

Leon was I am sure being "edgy".

It is not easy to see appropriate retributive justice when many of the potentially guilty are politicians from Labour and the Tories plus possibly a LD lady.

Maybe one of the very few bonuses of a Farage Government is he will have no qualms about throwing political opponents to the wolves.

I wasn’t being edgy at all. As I say I respect @cyclefree too much to casually troll her for bantz

I think this scandal is now being overdone. Far greater evils - of all kinds - are happening right now - and getting worse

It is therefore emotionally easier to distract ourselves with this relatively minor affair which has gratifyingly acceptable villains (the system, evil managers) and satisfyingly humble victims - poor Mr Bates

It’s a bit like the Salt Path (tho of course this scandal is true not fiction and real people have died and suffered)

Of course there are other equally or even more serious scandals out there. But that does not make this one chaff or unimportant. You can disagree if you want but you are, I'm afraid, being profoundly ignorant and stupid in doing so.

The entire legal system failed here. Not just failed but parts of it were actively involved in this scandal. The legal system is an essential part of law and order - the most fundamental duty of the state, one which has been at the heart of our history since the Tudors, earlier in fact. What that law and order means - for the state and the people living in it, how it is enforced, what justice is, how power is exercised, how to do so fairly not arbitrarily etc - are at the heart of history and politics. This case shows what happens when that fails, when lawyers - who are meant to be the custodes of this system, who are meant to be trustworthy - break that trust. They are the gatekeepers and when they go wrong the consequences are awful.

Someone asked why the courts didn't inquire. I'll tell you why. If someone pleads guilty the court assumes they've been properly advised. It doesn't inquire into whether they've been coerced or bullied or told lies or badly advised. It trusts that the professionals have done their job honestly.

But they didn't and when trust evaporates no system, no society can function.

I am incandescent about this scandal because these professionals were meant to be lawyers and investigators like me. But unlike me they have disgraced the profession I have spent a lifetime in. And they have done incalculable harm to the trust we ought to be able to have in professionals, in those we have to rely on.

You think this is a minor matter.

I give you Edmund Burke:

"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little."

Me writing about this is my very small attempt to do a little.