Sunak's subtle warning: "I think the issue between Gary Lineker and the BBC is one they should resolve. I hope they can resolve it in a timely fashion," came just a day before Lineker's reinstatement. Perhaps after nailing the Northern Ireland protocol and a deal with France over migrants, he felt that sorting out a single Lineker tweet should be easy. Yet in the Twitter age, it's been anything but.
It shows, instead, the power of celebrity: for at the heart of this issue is a compromise, the art of which seems to be something we've forgotten over our recent fractious years. The BBC's guidelines will be reviewed, as well they might because every "case" involving a celeb and their publicly expressed views seems to produce a different response: Lineker, Alan Sugar, Andrew Neil, Prue Leith, Jeremy Clarkson, David Attenborough and others all treated differently. The lesson seems to be that "one size fits all" rules don't work.
Gary Lineker's victory over the BBC has something of the romance of association football about it, a bit of a David vs Goliath tale. Such is the turnaround that it feels to Lineker fans very much like a famous victory. But is it?
There'll be crowd trouble. In reality, the points were shared, and we're back where we started. Even for post-Brexit Britain, it was getting very silly, turning football into, well, a political football.
This story is from the March 14, 2023 edition of The Independent.
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This story is from the March 14, 2023 edition of The Independent.
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