I’ve been in the Gary Lineker defence business for ages, since way before it was cool. In 2017, the Daily Mail attempted a hit job on his tax affairs – one of the laziest drive-bys in tabloid history, nothing but innuendo and guesswork. Arguably, it would have been better to ignore it, as there was nothing really to see. Besides, he’s no wallflower, Lineker, and hardly lacked a platform of his own. But it seemed important because the rightwing press was using confected disapproval as a deterrent; they didn’t really care whether he paid tax or not. They don’t even like tax. They just wanted to discredit his progressive credentials, to quell the leftish things he said, which were then, as now, mostly related to the treatment of refugees. If, in the process, they could corrode the unity of the wokerati, buttress the proposition that you have to be poor to be on the left (and you’ll never be quite poor enough) and make any other public figure think twice before skating anywhere near a humane point of view, all the better. I never thought Lineker’s reputation was under any threat, but I chimed in anyway, like a kazoo watching an orchestra and deciding it needed a bit of extra help.
This current row is not about any of the things it purports to be about: it’s not about the BBC’s rules on impartiality, which are wildly incoherent and, even if they made internal sense, wouldn’t apply to Gary Lineker anyway. It’s not about what you are and aren’t allowed to compare to 1930s Germany, and who is qualified to police those comparisons.
The question is more fundamental: when politics marches resolutely rightwards, at some point the concept of impartiality in the wider culture – a nice bevy of voices from other spheres, watching what they say because politics is not really their business – becomes meaningless. That’s what this debate is really about: are we at the point when silence is complicity, or do we have to wait till the policies are worse, till the language is more poisonous, till we’ve been fully ejected from the international community, before we can say that for certain? That’s what Lineker’s critics are really exercised about – not that he’s failed to be impartial, but that he’s exposed impartiality as the highest value for a different era.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
