While sports fans this morning are discussing why the entire England rugby team backed Gary Lineker by choosing not to turn up at Twickenham, the drama rumbles on. At its heart, this is a communications crisis borne out of that all-too-often-seen disease of people with important jobs taking themselves far too seriously.
First we have Gary Lineker: who, clearly unhappy with his lucrative lot in life, feels the need to get involved in politics. I’m interested in the views of all sorts of people outside of Westminster – including on the deeply complex issue of immigration. But Gary, whilst being one of my go-to thinkers on football, doesn’t make that list. Just as his fellow multi-millionaire pundit Gary Neville is not a person I pay a lot of attention to on the subject of food banks.
Next up on the taking-themselves-too-seriously list: the Tory MPs who quickly whipped themselves into an artificial outrage, claiming an historic breach of the BBC’s impartiality rules. By a tweet. From a football presenter. And maybe a few advisers in No.10 too who were, no doubt, applying angry pressure to their counterparts behind the scenes sensing, entirely wrongly, some kind of strategic opportunity. All of them taking Lineker’s tweet and themselves far, far too seriously.
Finally, Tim Davie the BBC Director General, who for reasons best known to himself decided this one deserved full defcon one status. He is mates with Lineker, one of his most expensive presenters. They speak frequently, yet he too failed to see the tweet for what it was. Davie, who is one of the smarter DGs of recent years, has previously displayed a deft touch but unfortunately, on this occasion, decided instead to take a long, luxurious swim in Lake Tim. To be fair, he must be a bit jittery given the recent revelations about Richard Sharp and his apparent informal role as financial adviser to Boris Johnson.
All this caused Davie to lose sight of what I assume is item no.1 on his job description … to keep the telly on. And as a result, he allowed Gary’s TV footballing colleagues (whose views on immigration I am also not interested in) to stage a mass walk out, thus buggering up the one day in the week when the BBC is really useful to millions.
The end result of this circus of self-importance? A football presenter elevated to global thought-leader, a government that looks petrified and thin-skinned, a DG who is worrying about his job, and a 20 minute (although, hilariously, far more widely-watched) Match of the Day. And all because of an unfunny and not especially insightful Tweet from a sports host. As the recently departed commentator John Motson once said: “They’re running round the pitch playing with themselves.”
The solution to this mess? Invite Lineker to return immediately, take some time to understand and perhaps redefine your own impartiality rules and acknowledge quickly that you got this one horribly, horribly wrong.
As far as impartiality goes, in my view it should be limited to those who work in current affairs where being unbiased actually matters. It does not matter on Twitter, especially when coming from the fingertips of a footballer presenter. If non news BBC presenters wish to get political then let them, as long as they make clear their views are their own. And if those comments breach the usual rules of employment then they should expect to be treated like any other employee.
But more importantly, the BBC needs to learn to look beyond the end of its own nose and have the spinal strength to see and treat a problem for what it is – not what those with thin skinned, self-serving agendas want it to be. The BBC has become so afraid of getting things wrong that it can’t, it seems, get anything right.
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