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.
The imbecility of the man is almost incomprehensible
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. But with the broadcast of that South Park episode two years ago, I had my breakthrough. Before it, MM was loathed by a massive number of people; after it, she is merely derided. The same goes for her walker. The only appeal the Sussexes have now is the comedy gold to be mined in the gaping chasm between what they believe they look like (fearless fighters for freedom and justice) and how they appear to the rest of us (two spiteful toddlers attempting to be bosses of a sandpit)
You can perform this transformative mood-booster with any number of people in the public eye; Harriet Harman, Owen Jones, Sandi Toksvig, Jolyon Maugham – pretty much anyone featuring in Gareth Roberts’s list of the greatest unintentional clowns of our age. He calls them Middle Class Holes; I call them Fundits – that is, public figures who believe themselves to be serious people but who are actually only there to amuse us, in the manner of a jester or a droll.
If only Gary Lineker’s misadventures were so picturesque. Instead he has one bone of contention, Achilles’ Heel and fool’s errand all rolled into one: the Israel-Palestine conflict. Scholars and soldiers alike have agonised for decades about how this sad situation can be settled – and who is the most voluble and visible commentator on it now? A man who won fame kicking a synthetic rubber bladder about.
Lineker can’t shut up about it. The imbecility of the man is almost incomprehensible. It’s like David Beckham deciding to try out for secretary-general of the United Nations when Antonio Guterres steps down. Here is Lineker on the conflict in Gaza: ‘I’ve got kids. They’re grown-up now, but every day people are losing their children, their brothers and sisters.’ What does he think happens in every war? That people lose their cats and dogs? Do Jews lose their children too, or don’t they count? As Oliver Brown politely puts it ‘Lineker risks being portrayed as having selective sensitivity, only reacting to one side of the story. For example, on October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched an attack of psychopathic brutality that ended in 1,141 deaths, the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, he apparently had nothing to say, his only tweet declaring: “Super Spurs are top of the league.”’, though Lineker has subsequently described the event as ‘awful’.
Incredibly, he can say straight-faced to Brown:
‘I won’t get involved in politics, I never really have. Apart from the Brexit vote, because I did a lot of research on that and decided, “This could be worse than we think.” I never back a government. I might criticise Sir Keir Starmer on Israel. But nobody knows my politics.’
Is he having a laugh? There are probably Martians who know his politics.
What will Gary do next, now that the gamut of Funditry has been run?
‘He discusses a wish to travel to India to watch cricket, and to return to Mexico for the first time since the World Cup in 1986, where he won the Golden Boot for England…at one stage, a radical career change was mooted by his employers. “It’s funny, when I was talking to the Beeb and they told me they didn’t want me to do another three years, they said, ‘We think you could do a cooking show’,” he recalls, rolling his eyes. “Are you kidding? I thought it was hilarious.”’
Of course he did. The very thought of tarring the name of this intellectual titan of our age with soggy bottoms! For Lineker truly seems to believe that he is one of the great political consciences of our time, a clear-eyed witness to the worst atrocity of the age, fearlessly speaking truth to power. He’s not planning on shutting up and putting on his travelling boots any time soon. He’s going to keep harping on about the Jews, for some weird reason. As I write, he’s in the throes of saying it wasn’t his fault he Instagrammed some anti-Semitic trope. He’s going to keep talking out of his fundament about an issue he knows nothing about.
But I don’t think he’s consciously lying – Fundits never knowingly lie, as they totally believe their own version of the truth. They really are supremely unconscious of that gap between how they see themselves and how the sentient part of society sees them. Just as Meghan Markle believed that she would be a powerful force for good on the world stage – probably bringing about world peace – and ended up making jam.
There are hints in the Telegraph interview that he’ll be getting involved in the transgender debate further in the future, though he demurs: ‘“Ugh,” he sighs, slumping so far forward in his chair he nearly hits the table. “You can’t cover that subject properly in a post. It’s too nuanced. I don’t actually think, in terms of sport, that it will ever be a real issue. Sport, as it’s already doing, will sort it out and work out rules. Like they did in boxing, when they realised they couldn’t have heavyweights against little fellas.”’
As the commentator Chris Rose summed it up on X:
‘Gary Lineker “logic”:
Tensions in the Middle East = Simple.
Immigration and border control = Simple.
Environmental issues = Simple.
Men in women’s sports = Woah, too complicated to form a straight answer!
He’s such a joke.’
He really is. But will this breast-beating, soul-baring Adrian Mole, 64 and a half, ever get it?
Comments