The face of the BBC

Nicole Lampert has an interesting CAPX piece on the inability of the BBC to prevent Gary Lineker from becoming its public face. Interesting, because his banal self-importance isn't the public face the BBC has been nurturing for decades. 


Gary Lineker is running rings around the BBC

In it’s fixture with Gary Lineker, the BBC seems to be allowing the ex-footballer to referee his own game. Ever since fellow BBC sports staff walked out of Match of the Day in support of the presenter last March following his tweet saying the government’s language over immigration was like ‘1930s Germany’, Linker has held the upper hand.

New social media rules for BBC staff were created around him. Still, he managed to break them last week by retweeting a call for the Israeli football team to be boycotted. Ironically enough the idea of wanting to boycott Jews felt particularly ‘1930s Germany’.


The whole piece is well worth reading as a familiar but perennially topical story about the influence of celebrities and the distorting lens through which they often view themselves.

Any other person would have been sent off long ago. Bizarrely, at least two BBC employees (that I know of) have faced disciplinary procedures for writing on Twitter about the unfairness of Lineker not having to abide by the same rules as everyone else.

In a mainly back-slapping interview in The Guardian (of course, where else?) at the weekend, Lineker played the victim, saying elements of the press were trying to ‘destroy’ him. But in the same interview he contradicted himself – when speaking about the 1930s Germany tweet, he said he had worded it carefully adding: ‘Anything that is slightly borderline political, I put a lot of thought into.’ The only person harming Lineker’s reputation is Lineker himself.