Gary Lineker is a joke

After a lifetime of being irritated by too many public figures to name, a few years back I discovered a way to bypass this minor but persistent feature of modern life. Whenever their asinine blatherings are splashed over the media, don’t read them as if they were the thoughts and utterances of reasonable – or even real people. Simply think of them as great comic creations of the type we see on screen in a ‘mockumentary’. Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap, David Brent from The Office or Alan Partridge. Instantly, your irritation will melt away and you can enjoy a good old snigger instead.

This clever trick first occurred to me when my fuming at the malignant foolishness of Meghan Markle started to affect my good humour some years back. Every day, it seemed, she would be pontificating about feminism or racism and being given an international platform to do so – for no other apparent reason but that a rather dim aristo picked her.