Gregg Wallace was no national treasure

To call Gregg Wallace a ‘national treasure’, as some did after his fall from grace last week, was inaccurate. Just because he is (or was) very popular on television does not qualify him. To attain national treasure status, a person needs to be older, as well as much nicer. The expression is vastly overused, lavished on too many undeserving celebrities, and it needs to be reined in. As Julie Burchill (sick to death of them last Christmas) wrote, ‘it seems harder to name a public figure who isn’t one’, and that most of them ‘can’t open their cake-holes without mouthing centrist platitudes which we’ve all heard a million times before’.

The criteria for national treasure (which should be vanishingly rare) are: a mixture of genius and humility; being extremely good at the main thing you do, plus (ideally) doing something else good on the side; being so good at the main thing you do that no one resents your success; bringing unalloyed, heart-warming delight to millions of people of all ages whenever you appear on a screen; being somehow above politics, so you don’t have half the world against you before you start; being so likeable that only really weird people don’t like you.

David Attenborough is the yardstick. If you said, ‘I don’t like David Attenborough’, people would think you must have issues. He’s old, kind, handsome (watch him as an impressive guest 50 years ago on Face the Music, now on iPlayer – swoon), superb at presenting, stayed married, is more interested in wildlife than in himself, and (the extra good thing) has alerted the entire population, through a lifetime of his programmes, to our need to look after the natural world. There’s no one quite to match him for those qualities, but others who have earned ‘national treasure’ status over a long life of delighting us are Felicity Kendal, Prunella Scales, Prue Leith and (surely) our late Queen. Our current Queen is well on the way. Gritting her teeth, Julie Burchill came up with just three: Maggie (now the late Maggie) Smith, Julie Walters and Michael Palin, in her tiny list of bearable national treasures. They are famous people who are not so puffed up by self-importance that they ‘lose sight of the fact that their opinion isn’t worth more than anyone else’s’.

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I should imagine Gary Lineker wishes he were a national treasure, having done the dual service of being good at football himself and talking about that same subject on television for years, but he’s too pleased with himself and his own opinions, and is not actually as popular as the BBC thinks he is. The BBC certainly treated him as if he were a national treasure, as they have treated too many of their stars. Jeremy Clarkson is working his way towards the status, through his tireless work (a mixture of egotistical and selfless) of both farming itself and making the formerly oblivious population aware of its dreadful hardships. But he blew it, in his two chief blunders: his excessive rudeness about the Duchess of Sussex and punching a colleague. That set him back a few decades.

Alongside ‘national treasure’ status, a new status is coming into being: that of ‘international treasure’. This is even more vanishingly rare to achieve, because you need to have all the above qualities, as well as being well known across many countries. What about Stanley Tucci? A brilliant actor, a superb cook, brings unalloyed joy to all who encounter him on a screen, first wife died, now happily married to second wife, dazzling us all in Conclave just after we’ve watched him make venison bolognese on Instagram.

And Roger Federer surely qualifies as an ‘international treasure’: a tennis-playing genius who manages to be modest about it, and to stay married. Terribly handsome again, which doesn’t do any harm when it comes to delighting the global population. Barack Obama almost qualifies, but being in politics rather than above it disqualifies him. Taylor Swift is on her way, overtaking the Duchess of Sussex, who blew it by being publicly nasty about her in-laws. Of all statuses to achieve, ‘national treasure’ and ‘international treasure’ should be the rarest and most impressive, far higher than any accolades from Nobel or the New Year Honours list.