The BBC’s humiliating climbdown over its attempted silencing of Gary Lineker is a milestone. For years, emboldened rightwingers have succeeded in driving the national political conversation ever further in their direction. They’ve achieved this in two ways: first, by treating progressive political opinions as illegitimate; and second, by simultaneously claiming that it’s rightwingers who are really being silenced, a truly shameless spectacle of crybullying.
It continues to this very day. Witness Richard Littlejohn’s column in the Daily Mail. “Endless strikes, the small boats crisis and now the Lineker fiasco are proof that anti-Tory groupthink has taken control in Britain”. Risible. And predictable.
The Lineker saga highlighted the playbook in all its cynicism and absurdity. For years, a newspaper industry largely run by rightwing moguls has spun a narrative that the corporation is a den of outrageous leftiness. This myth was always on a collision course with the facts. Forget Nick Robinson, former chair of the Young Conservatives turned chief political correspondent, then political editor: a far more egregious example in the context of Lineker is Andrew Neil. He was the Beeb’s longstanding flagship politics presenter, while chairing the Spectator, a hard-right magazine that has published such delights as “In praise of the Wehrmacht”, articles in support of Greek neo-Nazis, and others touting the great replacement theory and positing regret for the lack of Islamophobia in the Tory party.
Neil was able to spray rightwing opinions across his Twitter feed, including denouncing the Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr as a “mad cat woman”. And yet the BBC responded to Neil’s critics that he was “a freelancer and his Twitter account is a personal one – the BBC is not responsible for its content”. Compare and contrast to the swift retribution that followed Lineker’s condemnation of Tory rhetoric towards desperate people fleeing persecution, war and dictatorship.
Note, too, how the BBC has proven fertile recruiting ground for Tory spin doctors. Boris Johnson twice hired veteran BBC journalist Guto Harri; David Cameron hired the BBC news executive Craig Oliver; George Osborne hired BBC producer Thea Rogers (who became his partner); and Theresa May hired Robbie Gibb, former head of BBC political programmes.
Gibb is a particularly pernicious example of this busy revolving door: he was chief of staff to then Tory shadow chancellor Francis Maude before joining the BBC, and after serving as May’s spin doctor, helped found rightwing channel GB News, before returning to the corporation. He was appointed to the BBC board for a term of three years from May 2021 to May 2024. As the prodigious young former BBC journalist Lewis Goodall put it, Gibb made his “life really, really hard”. And of course today’s director general of the BBC, Tim Davie, is a former Conservative candidate, while its chair, Richard Sharp, is a Tory donor who helped arrange an £800,000 loan for disgraced Tory prime minister Boris Johnson.
How, then, has this preposterous myth proven so enduring? Perhaps rightwing newspapers genuinely believe it, because they are so accustomed to dominating the media ecosystem that they regard any deviation from conservative ideology to be unacceptable bias. But much more likely, they are simply aware that they have seized on an effective tactic. They can place the BBC under perpetual pressure from the right, both by witch-hunting anything that could potentially contradict the rightwing political consensus, and by pretending they are being victimised and marginalised within the BBC.
This is a microcosm of what has happened across British society. You are entitled to have profound misgivings about Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader of the Labour party, but was it wise to legitimise a narrative that the biggest threat of extremism and indeed racism came from the opposition party, while all the while the Tories were crafting the hostile environment that led to the Windrush scandal? It was a narrative that suited the Tory press well, and provided them with cover for their own racist coverage about migrants, refugees and Muslims. But it was never logical.
And while progressives might abhor this building of a false narrative, some gave it succour and oxygen. Think of a Labour government whose home secretary, David Blunkett, peddled poisonous rhetoric about refugees, including promising there would be no “swamping” of local schools. By normalising such ugly rhetoric, so-called “centrists” made it easier for an increasingly radicalised right to go even further. New Labour forcing out the BBC’s top brass in 2004 over its reporting on the Iraq war marked a pivotal moment in the relationship between the corporation and the government of the day, rendering the BBC the supine being we see today by the time the Tories returned to office.
After the heat of the weekend’s battle over Lineker and his tweets, a deal has been struck, but still the debacle offers an opportunity. A political project to make Britain a hostile environment for progressive opinions has suffered its most important defeat yet. It is a mark of the right’s triumphalism that they decided to pick a fight with a footballing hero: big mistake.
But this episode will have no enduring legacy unless we learn its lessons. The display of collective strength shown by Lineker’s colleagues was crucial in forcing the BBC hierarchy into retreat. The same uncompromising spirit must now be shown in facing down the right’s all too successful attempt to reshape political discourse.
Labour politicians should not echo the Tories’ ugly rhetoric, in the mistaken belief that there is no other way of securing the support of swing voters: it merely shores up the rightwing crusade. And now we know, they don’t have to.
And the independence of the BBC – in the face of whoever inhabits No 10 – must be secured as a matter of absolute principle. It’s good to rejoice at Lineker’s triumph, but essential to build on this victory – or it will all have been for naught.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
