The tragedy of Gary Lineker

So Gary Lineker, the footballing great turned sports-broadcasting great, will no longer host Match of the Day. Beyond the end of the current Premier League season, that is. Lineker is still contracted to cover next season’s FA Cup and the 2026 World Cup, but to all intents and purposes, he is no longer a BBC man – though he will continue to supply some of their football podcasts.

Thus also ends a years-long battle between Gary and BBC management over the supposed shackles of the BBC’s impartiality guidelines. Following Gary’s post-Brexit glow-up as a vapid liberal-left icon, to be relied upon to dispense fashionable opinions on social media, he is now free to fulfil his calling as a full-time virtue-signaller, and run his hugely successful Goalhanger podcast empire.

Last year, tensions between Lineker and the Beeb boiled over, after he hysterically accused the then Conservative government of indulging in fascist-like rhetoric about immigration. A stand-off ensued over his alleged breach of social-media rules, leading to his brief suspension from MotD, his co-hosts boycotting the show in solidarity, and a highlights-only edition of the show that – incidentally – chalked up record viewing figures.

Whether or not that hastened the uncoupling of the exorbitantly paid Lineker and the BBC, which is in the middle of making swingeing staff cuts, is unclear. Both sides have put out amicable statements and will continue to work together in some capacity. But whatever the rights and wrongs of all this, it feels like a grim milestone for Lineker – sealing his transformation from celebrated footballer and presenter to risible figure in our culture war.

Indeed, our cultural elites now seem to celebrate him primarily for his midwitted opinions. It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when Lineker wasn’t constantly cheered on by the Guardian-reading classes, while irritating pretty much everyone else.

When the ex-England captain took over as host of MotD from the urbane Des Lynam in 1999, he had a reputation as an amiable, sensible and self-deprecating sort. No one cared about his political views, because for the best part of 15 years, he didn’t care to share them.

He did once gently mock then prime minister David Cameron for ‘forgetting’ which claret-and-blue football team he supported. He also offered a sly comment on Tony Blair being given GQ’s 2014 ‘philanthropist of the year’ award. But for much of that time, Lineker’s most notable non-football intervention was to continue promoting Walkers crisps, despite the growing clamour in the mid-2000s for celebrities to stop endorsing ‘junk food’. If anything, this made him more likeable among those of us opposed to New Labour’s joyless puritanism.

Predictably, it was Brexit that turned Lineker from a jovial football man into a tweeting advertisement for smug, liberal-elite opinion. In 2016, he joined his peers among the cultural and media establishment and came out strongly in support of Remain. The day after Brits voted to leave the EU, he announced that he felt ‘ashamed of my generation’, accusing greying Brexiters of letting ‘down our children and their children’.

The die was cast. From that point on, Lineker didn’t really look back. He started to give near continuous voice to milquetoast anti-Tory and anti-Brexit sentiment. In return, he received a constant stream of plaudits from Britain’s liberal-left elites. The Tories’ plans to tackle illegal migration were ‘hideously racist and utterly heartless’, he said in 2016. In 2017, with Corbyn on the rise, he complained that ‘everything seems far right or way left’ in Britain. Looking longingly over at France, which had just elected President Emmanuel Macron, he wondered if ‘something sensibly centrist might appeal’ here, too. Then, the following year, Lineker endorsed the People’s Vote campaign for a second EU referendum. He told a rally in London that ‘some things in life are more important than football’ – ‘some things’ being an attempt to overturn the largest democratic mandate in British history.

It was around this time that Lineker co-founded Goalhanger. This multimillion-pound podcast company has since churned out a lot unimaginatively titled centrist ear-filler, from The Rest is Politics, with Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell, to The Rest is Money, with Robert Peston and Steph McGovern.

Following his ‘radicalisation’, Lineker has often rebuffed claims that he should ‘stick to football’, saying he continues to tweet and bloviate so that he can look himself in the mirror. Like far too many in our liberal establishment, he seems to have been deranged by the post-2016 era, convinced that a few democratic votes not going his way are akin to the rise of racism and fascism.

Most infamously, in March last year, he likened the ‘language used’ by former home secretary Suella Braverman about illegal migration to ‘that used by Germany in the ’30s’. This outrageous, Holocaust-relativising tweet earned him that brief suspension from the Beeb. It also earned him plaudits from the liberal establishment and, according to Lineker himself, a standing-ovation in the Barnes branch of M&S.

Seven months later, after the genuinely Nazi-like Hamas butchered and raped Israelis on 7 October, Lineker remained unusually football-focussed. His only tweet that day was ‘Super Spurs are top of the league’. However, he soon became an expert on the conflict, even endorsing a tweet accusing Israel of ‘genocide’ for defending itself. In an interview with Mehdi Hasan (natch), Lineker later referred to 7 October as ‘the Hamas thing’.

Such despicable, ignorant comments aside, you could almost feel sorry for him. Like so many celebrities today, our Gary has become hooked on virtue-signalling. A fiend for the retweets. Here’s hoping that, in the future, we will remember Lineker for what he is – and was – actually great at. Because political insight really isn’t it.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.