Impartiality is a knotty old concept, and one of the trickiest things about it is that it relies on the idea that you can safely find the middle ground. Witness the agonised attempts by the BBC and the Labour party to land on that sweet spot of unimpeachable banality after radical centrist firebrand Gary Lineker’s tweets became a rightwing media obsession this week. Instead of establishing themselves as the trusted representatives of the median voter or viewer, they have ceded moral authority to a man who spent last Sunday commentating on Nottingham Forest v Everton.
That’s Steve Wilson, one of the Match of the Day commentators who on Friday announced that they would be stepping back from their duties this weekend in solidarity with Lineker. Post-match analysis and player interviews will also be missing. The version of the BBC’s football highlights show that will be on air as a result – and the enforced dropping of Saturday’s Football Focus after its presenter Alex Scott, pulled out – is the natural endpoint of the position that the corporation has so painfully staked out for itself: a (political!) football fizzing about without much sense of why, or what the stakes are. Give up on meaningful analysis in pursuit of neutrality and the result is a version of events which is uncontroversial, certainly, but also difficult to understand.
One common theme of the response to Lineker’s intervention and its aftermath is to bemoan the fact that the media story is drawing so much more attention than the specifics of the government’s small boats policy itself. This is certainly true, as far as it goes, but what it misses is this: the Linekerology is only prominent because, even if you think his comparison of Suella Braverman’s rhetoric to that emanating from Germany in the 1930s is excessive, it is obviously the product of a moral clarity that has eluded the actual opposition.
Most people are now clearer on where a television presenter stands on the small boats crisis than where the Labour party, which has largely confined its critique to a managerialist argument about Home Office asylum application backlogs, does. If you’d rather people didn’t view every story through the prism of celebrity, you have to offer them a more compelling alternative.
The BBC director general and former Conservative council candidate Tim Davie, meanwhile, has acquiesced to a vision of the corporation’s responsibilities that is wholly the creation of those who would rather it did not exist. The BBC’s guidelines say that high-profile individuals should “avoid taking sides on party political issues or political controversies and to take care when addressing public policy matters”. It is not obvious why this should mean Lineker is off air, but Alan Sugar can praise Boris Johnson and excoriate Mick Lynch without any threat to the Apprentice and its stories of gormless business influencers hawking corporate hospitality packages in Dubai. The only conceivable distinction is that the government and its supporters across much of the media are angry about one, and couldn’t care less about the other.
To state the obvious: you shouldn’t trust a definition of impartiality created by actors with an obviously uneven way of applying it. Nor should you trust a vision for a public body set out by people who would like it to be privatised. Even so, the BBC appears resigned to meekly chasing after the football that the Daily Mail dangles in front of it. You will recall that when Charlie Brown did this with Lucy, he repeatedly wound up on his backside in the dirt. The headlines in the Conservative-supporting media this morning were not about the restoration of order at the corporation, but enthusiastic descriptions of “revolt” and “mutiny”.
If the right remains unappeased, the sheer giddiness of the broad left, which is now so elastic that it incorporates Jeremy Clarkson nodding approvingly at Ian Wright’s catalysing decision to withdraw from Match of the Day tonight, was a cheerful and unexpected addition to life’s rich tapestry on Friday afternoon. By happy coincidence, Wright’s tweet landed around the time that Labour recognised which way the wind was blowing, and dared to be carried by it so far as to issue an anonymous source quote saying something concrete about the Lineker business, if not the actual small boats crisis.
However Lineker’s employment status is resolved, we might hope that more significant consequences arise from all this. Keir Starmer should consult the anonymous source of that quote about what could be gained from a more nuanced understanding of what voters want than can be found in a PowerPoint presentation of the latest issue polling. Perhaps, he may conclude, sincerity and clarity will put him on safer ground than the endless pursuit of diluted border conservatism.
The BBC should figure out a standard for its non-news talent that makes more sense than muddy assertions on Friday that it had “never said that Gary should be an opinion-free zone”, recognise that nobody seriously thinks he is picking the Today programme’s running order, and apply whatever set of rules it arrives at with the same alacrity to its conservative stars as it does its liberal ones.
The rest of us, meanwhile, might wonder if the very idea of the political centre is bogus, and conclude that, instead, there are many political centres, calibrated not by who Rishi Sunak thinks he needs to keep onside in swing seats to defend his majority, or who is likely to pay for the Daily Mail, but by complicated and sometimes contradictory impulses around fairness, honesty, and who is deserving of the public’s trust. It’s pretty ridiculous that it takes a row over a football presenter’s tweets to give these ideas some traction. Now that it’s here, we shouldn’t waste it.
• Archie Bland is the editor of the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter
