‘I’ll be glad to see the end of 2009. It’s been a shocker of a year,” Antony Worrall Thompson told my colleague Katherine MacAlister in an interview 30 months ago as he prepared to become the face of Oxfordshire’s Local Flavours Festival. This followed the partial collapse of his business empire when his bank refused to extend his overdraft. The Lamb at Satwell was one of his properties that went.

At the dawn of 2012, the celebrity chef has good reason to consider that this already qualifies as a shocker, too, as he faces the opprobrium — and much cruel abuse — arising from his shoplifting activities.

“Ready, Steady, Crook” was the Sun headline to the story revealing his police caution following pilfering at the Tesco store in Henley-on-Thames. Wine and cheese were among the groceries he pinched by placing them in his bags without scanning them.

The apology he posted on his website sounded pretty genuine to me. He said: “I am so sorry for all my recent stupid and irresponsible actions: I am of course devastated for my family and friends, whom I have let down and will seek the treatment that is clearly needed.”

While the chef’s plight ought properly to invite sympathy and not spite, spite is what he has received from the more poisonous elements of the press.

The nastiest comments I read came from Robert Crampton, in The Times. He recalled meeting “the ugly and not remotely likeable” Worrall Thompson 18 years ago when “for some unfounded reason he took against me, becoming verbally . . . abusive”. As a consequence of this long-ago slight, the sensitive scribe found his enemy’s fall from grace “rewarding”. Always kick a man when he’s down, do you, Robert?

I hold the chef in no especially high regard, though on the few occasions I have met him he has been pleasant and helpful. I have also admired his food; the taste of a lamb tagine he cooked for me (and dozens of others) at a long-ago lunch at Luxter’s Vineyard, near Henley, remains with me many years later.

As with many cooks in his position, with too many pots to keep an eye on, delivery has sometimes been a problem. Reviewing The Greyhound, at Rotherfield Peppard (which he still runs) five years ago, I was astonished to find no ‘Antony’s Middle White Suckling Pig’, though this was a house speciality, and no puddings of any kind because of a malfunction with the cookers.

If there is any satisfaction to be gained by me from Worrall Thompson’s disgrace it is that his ‘victim’ should have been Tesco. My dislike of this supermarket chain will be well known to regular readers of this column. Ruthless in its pursuit of profit, the company uses all of its considerable power to open stores against the wishes of local people. A number of these, of course, have been in Oxford.

The past few years have seen Tesco — and, to be fair, Sainsbury’s too — reoccupying the urban centres they helped to denude with their huge out-of-town stores.

The creation of new jobs is often advanced as justification for their expansion. But this claim starts to have a hollow ring when the spread of self-service — to the temptation of which Worrall Thompson succumbed — requires fewer and fewer check-out staff.

I have sedulously avoided using scanning machines. Once, on a late-night visit to the Tesco store on the outskirts of Buckingham, I arrived at the tills, with a full trolley of shopping, to find none was open and that I was required to self-scan. I told the manager I was not prepared to do it and would leave my shopping behind if he insisted I should. He scanned it for me.

I have never, incidentally, returned to that particular store, which a national newspaper later identified as one of the most expensive Tesco stores in the country. It had — possibly still has — a local monopoly, meaning disgruntled customers were unable to vote with their feet.