Is there a whiter place in London than Barnes? I ask only because I have been going there at the weekends for the last two years to buy artisan chocolate croissants and artisan coffee from a favourite artisan café (artisan is metropolitan for expensive), and to let my daughter bother the ducks at the picture perfect pond on the green. In that time I’ve been amazed by the lack of people of colour I have encountered. Once you start noticing you can’t stop. By my reckoning, in those two years I’ve seen only two people of colour in Barnes. A black man on a bike riding down the high-street, and an Indian-looking man working in the newsagent. I am not making this up. Everyone else I’ve observed in Barnes has been white. Not white like you see outside of London. Not grossly fat or tattooed or drunk. No one is ugly. Everyone in Barnes is white, sober and catalogue handsome. Oh, and rich.
I mention all this because Barnes is where Gary Lineker, he of the BBC rich list, lives. It’s presumably from where he does a lot of his tweeting – from his mansion in Barnes – to his six million disciples. Barnes is where Gary shakes his head in sorrow and thinks of witty puns with which to decorate his often plangent-seeming thoughts about the direction in which things are headed, prior to publishing them on Twitter. Gary looks out over Barnes, perhaps from his well-appointed kitchen, a steaming artisan coffee on the marble island in front of him, watches the monochromatic progeny of millionaires frolicking on the green, attended by puppies and nannies and thinks: ‘why oh why oh why?’
Then it all comes gushing out. ‘If it weren’t for migrants we couldn’t staff the NHS,’ he tweets. ‘Those meddling EU buggers attempting to deliver fairness again. Won’t do.’ ‘They’re trying to stop you reading about Dementia Tax. That’s Dementia Tax. Think about that for a minute. Dementia Tax.’ ‘Reckon if there was another Brexit referendum, remain would romp home. Awareness of how we were duped & young would vote in droves. Hey-ho.’ ‘Whatever you feel about Tony Blair, and yes Iraq will forever stain his reputation, he’s a marvellous orator and speaks much sense on Brexit.’ ’83 year old Lord Heseltine fired by government for speaking sensibly about Brexit. It’s as though to reason is now treason.’
Despite living in all white, mosque-free Barnes, Gary frequently uses Twitter to enlighten his followers about immigration. For example, after President Trump (Gary is not a fan of president Trump: ‘when it comes to really shitty US Presidents, Donald Trump might just be the winningest’) saw fit to drop 59 large missiles on a Syrian airbase, a decision occasioned by President Assad’s use of chemical weapons on his own people, Gary was not afraid to make his feelings felt. He went full princess of hearts. ‘Given the escalation of events can we please be a little more understanding, sympathetic and humane towards the poor Syrian refugees,’ he asked the world, via Twitter.
When some cretinous non-celebrity had the temerity to enquire in reply ‘how many refugees have you taken in to your million pound mansion then?’, Gary to his credit never once mentioned the incredible difficulty anyone living in Barnes would encounter trying to find a refugee to adopt (where would one even begin to look?). ‘This is the only comeback the heartless have. Idiocy knows no bounds,’ he said instead.
It would be easy to write Gary off as just another incredibly wealthy, fairly dim celebrity living a life of untrammelled, jet-set luxury, almost completely out of touch with ordinary people and their enormously tedious concerns (‘one day you’re in New York, the next, Dubai. Not quite sure, though, what day it is,’ was a tweet that afforded a rare window on to the scale of Gary’s struggles). Certainly, he seems a smug git.
In his position, though, who wouldn’t be a smug git? Reportedly worth around thirty-odd million. The 1986 World Cup Golden Boot in the trophy cabinet. The plum job presenting Match of the Day and the willingness of seemingly everyone in the country not to get too narky about the blatant political bias despite the lavish remuneration from the publicly funded and supposedly politically neutral Beeb. It must be alright being Gary Lineker.
Now, inevitably, there’s talk of high office. Only last month, Rachel Johnson, referring to him as the People’s Snowflake, reported in these pages that there has been discussion among Gary’s media chums of a Macron-style run to become prime minister. Gary has done little to dispel the rumour, instead tweeting: ‘Boy we could do with a Macron; a centrist option. And he played football too.’ Could it happen? Maybe it should. Maybe it’s an idea whose time has come.
You don’t have to follow Gary for long on Twitter to understand that he sees himself as a man of the people, and not just people like his fellow white, super-rich neighbours in Barnes (I’ve found the stats now – 86 percent white, according to the 2011 census). Gary wants to be heard, and not just in order to profit massively by advertising crisps. Gary wants to make a difference, and his ambitions seem to run beyond using word play to make people think about how to be nicer to each other.
Gary has stuff to say and Twitter is the mount from which, fortunately for us, he has hitherto been able to deliver his sermons. But now, perhaps, it’s time for Gary to come down from the mount and to lead his people to the promised land. Which, one suspects, might look a lot like Barnes. Artisan coffees all round.
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