Why there are no winners after the BBC’s two-footed tackle on Gary Lineker

K eep politics out of sport. Ha, yeah. Good luck with that. Meanwhile, in what we must, if only out of a sense of convention, call the Real World, we have this: the strange and sinister developments of Friday evening in what will now come to be known as the Lineker affair.

The suspension of Gary Lineker from BBC presenting duties – not Newsnight or Question Time, but the bloodless warm bath of Match of the Day – over a tweet sent on Wednesday afternoon criticising government policy on migrants is, frankly, a jaw-dropping act of political intervention.

Of course both the BBC and the government will deny that this is an act of direct intervention. The only real response to that is: do you believe them?

And let us be clear: it really doesn’t matter what Lineker has been banging on about on his Twitter feed. It doesn’t matter if you like him, or agree with him, or feel annoyed by him. Perhaps you just want to watch the football. Perhaps you actively dislike and fear migrants. Perhaps this is in part because the government and friendly media keep stating (incorrectly) that the UK is being disproportionately assailed or invaded or colonised by them.

The fact is everybody loses, everything is diminished, when it is in the gift of the government of the day to decide who gets to say what on issues of basic human kindness. What we have here is the de facto state censorship of a man who says things like “and now to Goodison” in between footage of people playing football, for the crime of having freelance opinions on social media.

The title of stupidest, nastiest national discourse is, of course, a hotly contested global title. What makes the actions of the BBC in suspending Lineker over his personal tweets that bit worse is that