It’s a crying shame that we will no longer hear the insightful and original opinions of Gary Lineker. No more comprehensive and judicious appraisals. No more balanced verdicts delivered in an authoritative yet amiable manner. No longer will we witness Lineker draw from his deep well of experience and knowledge to deliver his considered conclusions. Saturday evenings will never be the same again.
Yes, I am of course talking about Gary Lineker the popular television football pundit, not Gary Lineker the unpopular political thinker. While the first version can lay claim to be – or once could have claimed to be – a national treasure, the newer, other iteration has become a figure of wide derision and even loathing.
It’s wrong to single out Lineker for special opprobrium
It’s pity that Lineker’s simple-minded salvos on social media, where he vented so unwisely, yet so predictably, on matters related to Palestine, immigration and the Tories, ultimately may have cost him as job as Match of the Day presenter and the BBC’s trusty World Cup helmsman. Because he was good at his job.
It was no small task to assume the mantle of ‘Match of The Day’ frontman in 1999, not least because he replaced the much respected and undisputed national treasure, Des Lynam. Lineker’s early appearances were criticised for their wooden delivery, but he was keen to learn. And over the years he has become one of the most assured and trusted football pundits in the business. The former Everton, Tottenham and England striker was able to draw on his formidable first-hand experience of the game. As a spectator and observer, his footballing mind continued to develop and mature.
Mature, however, is not the word that springs to mind in relation to Lineker’s musings on Twitter and X. They have come straight from voguish, progressive dogma and the juvenile, radical left. His post on X in March last year comparing government rhetoric on immigration policy to 1930s Germany was said to be the last straw for the BBC. But it epitomised a consistent callowness and shallowness, witnessed in his endorsement of an Owen Jones video accusing Israel of ‘genocide’, or in his derisory comments on Brexit, an almost obligatory standpoint found among his overclass type and elite ilk.
But it’s wrong to single out Lineker for special opprobrium. His vacuous politicking reflects a wider malaise. Those in the public eye assume that being good at one thing qualifies them to be experts in other fields. And we, the public, collude in this delusion. We indulge the famous, or the clever or successful, because we subconsciously defer to achievers. We make people like Carol Vorderman figures of authority.
This has traditionally been the case when it comes to actors, a type notorious for shooting their mouths about current affairs. The actress Emma Thompson was at it in June when she appeared at an environmental protest in London, voicing her tacit support for the activists Just Stop Oil. Fellow thespians Hugh Grant and Steve Coogan also bore for England with their political interventions, in their case for their persistent attacks on the principle of free press in this country.
In recent years actors have been joined in their tireless and tiresome politicking by prominent figures from other walks of life. The week before Thompson was on the march, the actor Brian Cox was speaking out once more about Brexit. This is also a pet obsession of TV presenter Terry Christian, and one they both share with the philosopher A. C. Grayling, whose monomania on the subject on X has become the stuff of legend and parody.
Anyone who has read a book by Grayling will recognise a man of singular intelligence, and a rare philosopher who writes with clarity and elegance. This does not automatically qualify him to be expert on the European Union. For that you need to understand politics, possess an anthropological mindset in approaching matters pertaining to cultural and society, and, above all, an understanding of European history. Vociferous and unreconstructed EU-fanatics seem to possess none of these qualities.
As with Grayling in this regard, an even greater case can be made for Noam Chomsky, one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers who has notably poor politics. Knowledge of the latter doesn’t automatically follow from wisdom on the former. If posterity is fair, Chomsky will be remembered for his theory of universal grammar, and for helping to dethrone a stubborn and longstanding error of 20th century philosophy: the belief that there is no thought without language.
Similarly, all things being just, BBC viewers will recall with fondness Gary Lineker’s company on the small screen on a Saturday night. We should cherish and remember his affability and authority when it came to talking about football.
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