The season has ended for Gary Lineker. And in the BBC dressing room there must be an enormous sense of relief, for their highest-paid star, once regarded its most valued asset, had become an uncontrollable maverick seemingly intent on wrecking its actual most valued asset: trust.
It is a sad end to a 26-year relationship between the BBC and Match of the Day host Lineker. But after he shared an Instagram post about Zionism that featured an image of a rat, an age-old anti-Semitic slur, it was a social media outrage too far.
He deleted the post and “apologised unreservedly”. Last year he shared a post calling for Israel to be banned from international football. Go back two years, and he was suspended after saying that the language used in the then government’s asylum policy was “not dissimilar” to that used by Germany in the 1930s. Within months, the BBC published new social media guidelines for flagships presenters.
The new guidelines were neatly etched on the head of a pin in a bid to balance freedom of expression with the need to demonstrate impartiality. Insiders complained that in reality it enabled big stars like Lineker and Alan Sugar to continue to tweet on anything (other than direct party political content) while junior staff came under greater scrutiny.
Lineker’s most recent post was a foolish mistake. But beyond that, the majority of content he has shared over the years has included opinions many of us would support: highlighting the lies told around Brexit, the last government’s immigration policy, and the plight of civilians in Gaza. Yet we are not the £1.4m-a-year face of the nation’s public service broadcaster as it attempts to cling on to truth and objectivity in a polarised world bubbling with misinformation.
In an interview with Amol Rajan, Lineker was asked about his views on the Israel-Gaza conflict. He replied: “I’m sorry – it’s more important than the BBC. What’s going on [in Gaza] is the mass murder of thousands of children and is probably something that we should have a little opinion on.”
And he is right. The plight of civilians in Gaza is something he, with millions of followers on social media, should have an opinion on: as an influencer, he has a moral duty to highlight this bloodbath.
But the BBC is not a social media influencer. It is a news organisation that while reporting on the atrocities in Gaza must also seek to operate with the highest journalistic standards.
The problem was never Lineker’s views on Gaza or Brexit, but his insistence on straddling the worlds of old and new media in a way that is no longer possible.
Lineker has been a trailblazer in new media, with 8.7m followers on X and 1.3 million followers on Instagram. His Goalhanger podcast-producing company has had more than 300 million downloads. Match of the Day’s 3.5 million viewership is comparatively tiny. Lineker can use his platform to highlight important issues and he does not need the old media world to be relevant. But our society needs the old world to be preserved in some form if we are to have non-partisan reporting to seek out truths around which we as citizens can try to coalesce.
Elton John is threatening legal action against the government as it continues in its capitulation to Big Tech over copyright laws. He called the Science and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle “a bit of a moron” when he appeared on Laura Kuenssberg’s Sunday morning show, speaking after the government rejected a House of Lords proposal to force AI companies to be more transparent over how they train models.
The desperate race for growth and AI investment is blinding the government to the long-term consequences of allowing Big Tech to plunder our music, journalism and literature without consent or payment.
Without fair trade for content our creative industries will be decimated. And who will feed the AI machines then?
A government spokesperson said it won’t do anything on copyright rules “unless we are completely satisfied they work for creators”. Few are convinced.
John has been embroiled in many high-profile feuds over the years, with Madonna, Keith Richards, and even his own mother. And with an estimated fortune of £470m, the weight of the British creative industry behind him and a long history of not backing down, he may be singing “I’m still standing” at the end of it all.
The future of the Telegraph looks set to conclude after the government announced that foreign state-owned investors will be able to take up to a 15 per cent stake in British newspaper publishers.
It’s good news for the title which has faced two years of uncertainty since the last government blocked a £500m purchase by an Abu Dhabi-backed consortium. The deal could be back on, with a smaller investment from the UAE.
Other news groups may now look to attract Middle Eastern money at a difficult time for the industry, yet this is not without risks. The last Tory government considered an upper limit of between 5 and 10 per cent. A 15 per cent stake is significant and could in some situations represent the largest investor.
We would not countenance a 15 per cent British government share in one of our news titles – why so relaxed about Emirati involvement?
[See also: Gertrude Stein’s quest for fame]
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This article appears in the 21 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain’s Child Poverty Epidemic