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The UK’s leading charity for autism has said it is important not to generalise about the condition in the wake of comments made by Gregg Wallace in which he appeared to link the allegations of misconduct made against him to his own diagnosis.

The TV presenter was sacked as MasterChef presenter on Tuesday after an inquiry into his alleged inappropriate behaviour by the production company Banijay.

New claims emerged this week about the TV presenter from 50 or more people, to the BBC, with the majority saying he made inappropriate sexual comments. Eleven women accused him of inappropriate sexual behaviour, such as groping and touching.

In a statement, the 60-year-old presenter said he had recently been diagnosed as autistic but TV bosses had failed to “investigate my disability” or “protect me from what I now realise was a dangerous environment”.

The former greengrocer posted a statement on his Instagram page on Tuesday claiming he had been cleared of the “most serious and sensational accusations” against him.

In response, a spokesperson for the National Autistic Society, said: “Every autistic person is different, just like every non-autistic person is different, so it is important not to generalise or make judgments based on the actions, words or behaviour of any one individual.”

Some of the more recent claims include a MasterChef worker who said she tried to complain about comments she alleged Wallace made about her body in 2022, and a former police officer who said he tried to raise concerns after he allegedly witnessed Wallace making inappropriate sexual comments at a charity event in 2023.

Other autism and disability charities and campaigners criticised Wallace’s comments.

Jessie Hewitson, a director of NeuroUniverse, a company that trains companies in supporting neurodiverse employees, who is autistic, said: “I don’t make the connection between this alleged behaviour and autism.

“We support companies in supporting their neurodivergent employees. Common scenarios we encounter with autistic people are often they may say things in a direct way which offend colleagues.

“For example, there might be heightened anxiety around something’s changed [at work]. And to other colleagues it can look like the autistic person is being very difficult, when, really, potentially, they’re just very stressed.

“Those are the kind of common misunderstandings you encounter. We’ve never encountered someone coming to us saying they’ve got an autistic employee who’s behaved in a sort of sexually inappropriate way or has said sexually inappropriate things.”

Hewitson said the law stated that employers had to support neurodivergent people, but that did not offer a “free pass” for bad behaviour.

“It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take responsibility for it,” she said.

“We’ve been terribly stereotyped since the dawn of time. Everyone considers us emotionless, weird robots, and we were totally dehumanised.

“I feel like that stereotype is starting to go so I worry that this will create a conflation in some people’s minds between inappropriate workplace behaviour and autism.”

Seema Flower, the founder of Blind Ambition, a disability training consultancy, said: “To use autism as an excuse to behave the way that he is alleged to have behaved is very, very poor.

“This was over 20 years. If you do it once, you do it twice, then you’ve got a problem. You go and seek some advice and get some remedies and strategies in place.”

Flower said it was “really damaging” to perceptions of autistic people. “It has great, negative ramifications,” she said.

“Because the general public will think ‘that person’s got autism, they’re going to be likely to sexually assault me or abuse me or make inappropriate comments’.

“People will be less likely to employ people with autism, they’re less likely to work with them. They’re less likely to to have any interaction with them sexually.”

She added: “It’s also making a mockery of the whole diagnosis of autism. You’re saying that if someone’s got autism, are they going to get a free pass to inappropriately behave with women or men?”

British people say “sorry” on average nine times a day, according to research by Babbel, a German language learning app – the upstart Duolingo. Foreigners were baffled that it was so often, and I was baffled that it was so infrequent.

I said it that many times just going once round Tesco Metro (I can’t even process how many times I’d be sorry in the mega-store):

1. Sorry (you are between me and a basket, you ought to have foreseen this, there is only one basket-station. Now that you haven’t, all we can do is mourn);

2. Sorry (I slightly trod on you);

3. Sorry (you’re clearly one of those people who still observes a one-way system, post-Covid, and even though I plainly disagree with this, otherwise I’d also do it, I sympathise with your vexation);

4. Sorry (you’re going way too fast and that’s why we nearly collided, so really you should be sorry, except you seem a bit high, so I am sorry for your predicament);

5. Sorry (we both reached for the same thing, yet the stakes are low, there are 17 more);

6. Sorry (I joined the queue in the wrong place);

7. Sorry (you joined the queue in the wrong place);

8. Sorry (shop assistant, you are very slow to approve my age-sensitive purchase, considering you could ID me from space);

9. Sorry (that my Clubcard isn’t scanning, person behind me, even though I 100% guarantee that yours isn’t going to scan either).

This is why foreigners don’t understand us; not because of “British understatement” or even our fabulous heuristic of saying the opposite of what we mean, but because the word “sorry” has infinite potential meanings – its intention can change in the middle of saying it. Probably – at a maximum – one time in 10 it means “I did wrong, and I apologise”. Maybe predominantly it means “you did wrong, but no hard feelings”. It can mean, “we’ve both slightly transgressed one another’s boundaries, and this is me signalling that life is too short to thrash out a shared norm, while at the same time, not being ready to completely surrender”. And this is just the sorries in a shop, with absolute strangers, no expectations, no consequences.

A lot of the sorries identified by linguists are actually so strikingly pass-agg, so much like a punch in the face, that I’d never use them unless I was muttering at the radio (as I was, twice in this two-day experiment: “I’m sorry, Conservative former minister, it’s simply not true that you can self-diagnose a mental illness and then get disability benefits”; “Sorry, gentleman on Magic FM, that isn’t how carbon offsetting works”). It’s like conjugating verbs in ancient Flemish: you can use the sarcastic-correction sorry, but only in these very precise circumstances; in private to yourself; as a joke; or on TV.

I stepped out of the house and went for a coffee where, after my first cup, I said a genuine “sorry – can I have another double espresso?” It meant a lot – I would hate to parade my caffeine dependency without shame; I don’t want to put you to a repetitive task five seconds straight after you last did it; yet I do understand commerce, and if I had thought you really minded, I’d have gone with: “I’m really, really sorry.”

After that, the gamut of maternal sorries; “sorry you’re too hot” (you are whining, I cannot control the weather); “sorry I didn’t wake you up” (you should have woken yourself up); “sorry there’s no oat milk” (just drink milk). I guess that starts as a jujitsu move, if you apologise enough, they’ll realise that they shouldn’t have complained in the first place? A kind of Basil Fawlty, “the management is processing your complaint, and all he can do is extend his heartfelt contrition, and then have a nervous breakdown”. It doesn’t work, at all. I don’t even know if they know I’m drawing on a deep cultural well of fake apology.

Factor in the sorries of the road – hand-signal sorries; eyebrow-yikes, sorry!; more sarcastic “sorry your indicators seem to be broken” – and by the time you sit down to do any kind of work, the currency has been debased, and if you’ve done anything even mildly wrong, that you actually do all the time, like take two days to reply to something, you’re heading towards “so so so so sorry”; “I want to shoot myself in the face, I’m so sorry”.

It’s all pretty easy to decode, at least from the inside. The hard thing would be to stop doing it.