Gino D’Acampo is accused of multiple counts of inappropriate sexual behaviour, which he firmly denies. But two of Britain’s most renowned newspaper columnists have written in defence of the Italian TV chef.

Jeremy Clarkson has faced his own controversies, after being sacked by the BBC for punching a Top Gear producer and forced to apologise to Meghan Markle for saying he’d like to see her “parade naked though the streets” and pelted with “excrement”, reported the Scottish Daily Express.

Writing in his Saturday column in The Sun, Jeremy Clarkson listed D’Acampo, alongside “that man from the Go Compare adverts, Phillip Schofield and Gregg Wallace” as celebrities who have “become pariahs in recent times”.

Clarkson continued in his column: “None of them is accused of doing something illegal.

D’Acampo has firmly denied all accusations of sexually inappropriate behaviour (Image: Marco Secchi/Getty Images)

“They just said something or did something which someone found offensive. And that’s that. It doesn’t even have to be a current misdemeanour.”

He added: “People who crave fame tend to be extroverts. Show-offs. The life and soul of the party. They are people who’ll do pretty much anything to get a laugh. Fun people. The exact sort of people who occasionally say something ‘wrong’.”

Clarkson said it was “a different kettle of fish” for a famous person to be “catapulted into oblivion.”

He said: “Because if you go to the shops or to the pub or even the park, you know people are going to stare at you and maybe even say something unpleasant.”

And he concluded: “In other words, you have your five minutes of fame and then, because we live in a world where everyone is offended by everything, it’ll be followed by 50 years of being a hermit.”

Another defender of D’Acampo is the Daily Mirror’s TV critic Brian Reade, who wrote in his Saturday column: “First they took Gregg Wallace off our screens for being loose with the saucy language and now it looks like Gino D’Acampo may suffer the same fate.”

He described both as “crashing narcissistic bores” but said in their defence that an “obsession with sauciness” is in the genetic makeup of celebrity chefs.

Reade brought up Britain’s very first kitchen superstar, Fanny Cradock, who in the 1950s famously said of herself and her husband: “Every Fanny needs a Johnnie.”