The telephone conversation hadn’t entirely gone as planned. The perfect end to the perfect weekend at WIA.
Richard Sharp: Gary. Dear boy!
Gary Lineker: What?
Sharp: Umm. The thing is … We’d quite like you to apologise …
Lineker: What for?
Sharp: This impartiality business...
Lineker: It’s not me who donated £400K to the Tory party...
Sharp: Yes, yes. But if you could find some way of saying you are sorry on the Twitter for having suggested the government doesn’t much like foreigners...
Lineker: Well, it doesn’t...
Sharp: I know, but if you could just pretend that you didn’t mean what you had Twittered...
Lineker: No...
Sharp: Well this is awkward. You see, it’s fine to support the government like Alan Sugar and Michael Portillo. That’s the definition of impartial. But to criticise is just not on.
Lineker: No...
Sharp: Then, could you perhaps make sure Southampton gets a bigger time slot on Match of the Day? Or show them scoring more goals so that it appears they have won? Rishi would be ever so grateful if they weren’t relegated...
Lineker: No...
Sharp: Then how about I apologise to you and you are free to go back to presenting Match of the Day and Twittering what you like?
Lineker: Sure. That works for me.
BBC 0, Lineker 1. A scoreline that sent many Tories into a meltdown during an urgent question into the government’s role in the BBC’s impartiality from Lucy Powell, the shadow culture secretary. Powell shook her head sadly. Linekergate was a sorry saga. One that had the government’s fingerprints all over it. First BBC bosses said Lineker could say what he liked; the next day they suspended him. It was clear they had been nobbled by the government. Just like Putin’s Russia. Made a change from 1930s Germany, I suppose.
Replying for the government, the junior culture minister Julia Lopez – her boss, Lucy Frazer, had made herself unavailable – looked bewildered. She was certain no senior Tories had had a word with any BBC bosses. At least, no more so than it was usual for ministers to chat with Sharp and the director general, Tim Davie. After all, they were all good mates. And sometimes people get to change their minds after speaking to friends. It’s how the world works. Journalists at the BBC might all be bleeding-heart liberals, but the boss class was a Tory cabal.
Lopez garbled this out, reading from a prepared script. So most of it was barely intelligible, let alone coherent. She definitely wasn’t going to talk about Lineker. Because that would somehow breach the BBC’s impartiality rules. And if anyone had been leaning on anyone’s throats it had been the rightwing press. She had got an earful from the Daily Mail. An outrage that a football pundit might have a mind of his own and be critical of the government. You could have too much of this free speech business. Except when it came to deporting foreigners.
As for Sharp, he had been appointed in an entirely transparent manner. It was quite customary for any BBC chair to help pave the way for an £800K loan facility for the prime minister just before applying for the job. And it was perfectly normal for Sharp to have been Sunak’s boss at Goldman Sachs. Dicky had always said that Rishi showed a great deal of potential. So he was happy to have been proved right. But these connections were just coincidence – the wheels of the old boy network in motion – and no one could possibly say Dicky-boy hadn’t been appointed on merit.
There was no sign of perennial BBC bashers Nadine Dorries and Lee Anderson in the Commons. Perhaps they were too busy with their day jobs of being impartial on TalkTV and GB News. And John Redwood scarpered out the Commons before coming into contact with the enemy.
So it was left to the absurd John Hayes to lead the attack on Lineker and the BBC. The station was full of “smug, arrogant and avaricious” football pundits, he insisted. He could have been describing himself. Hayes is what passes for Suella Braverman’s brains – she runs her policy by him to check it’s unpleasant enough – and earns £120K a year in side hustles.
Tom Hunt reckoned Gary was a tax avoider, while Alun Cairns reckoned he was a member of a privileged and overpaid elite. Er... a word in your shell-like. Being a tax avoider, privileged and overpaid are supposed to admit you to the Tory inner circle. What they really can’t forgive Gary for is having a conscience.
Predictably, there were a couple of headbangers who reckoned there was only one solution to L’Affaire Lineker. Get rid of the licence fee. If the BBC couldn’t be trusted to support government policy unquestioningly then the game was up for it. Scott Benton, a man who wrestles with Hayes for sole possession of a brain cell, even reckoned Match of the Day had been much improved without its cast of commentators and pundits. At least we got to see the goals. It wasn’t clear what he thought normally happened on MOTD.
Less than an hour earlier, junior transport minister Huw Merriman had been having a nightmare of his own as Mark Harper had hung him out to dry by leaving him to answer an urgent question on HS2. Everything was going terribly well, he insisted. Apart from the bits that weren’t. Remember how high speed rail was once going to Manchester. Well, everyone should maybe chill about that. It would now only go to Birmingham. And only then in a parallel universe. If it did ever go father north, it would be a mistake.
But not to worry. Because it wasn’t even going to London either. It would now stop at Old Oak Common instead. Forty-five minutes from Birmingham to Old Oak. Forty-five minutes from Old Oak to Euston. Genius. £100bn to make the journey slower. But at least people would now be able to drop in on the new Primark in Old Oak. This was a regeneration opportunity.
Predictably, Merriman got it in the neck from almost everyone. His own side especially. Horrified at the overspend. Horrified at the delay. Horrified that the great levelling up agenda had once again been exposed as a chimera. Huw became ever squeakier as he searched in vain for a friendly face. It would definitely get built. Just not this century. The service from platform 4 had been cancelled.
