Gary Lineker outrageously breached the BBC's sacred impartiality trends now
The BBC is broadly right in its treatment of Gary Lineker. At the heart of the Corporation there is a simple, hard bargain between BBC and government.
The Charter and Agreement commit the Corporation to fairness, in return for the unique and highly valuable right to benefit from the licence fee.
There have been times in the past when it was pardonable to wonder if the Corporation's top deck had forgotten that any obligations came with the rivers of public gold that flow through their corridors and studios. Mr Lineker, for instance, has in the past tested the limits and escaped censure.
And here it is worth pointing out that the BBC has to care about what its major stars say on social media. This is because power on Twitter and other internet platforms comes pretty much directly from TV exposure.
Almost invariably, those with the greatest number of followers are those with the highest TV profile. It is impossible to separate the two.
The BBC is broadly right in its treatment of Gary Lineker (pictured). At the heart of the Corporation there is a simple, hard bargain between BBC and government
The Charter and Agreement commit the Corporation to fairness, in return for the unique and highly valuable right to benefit from the licence fee
Anything Mr Lineker – or any other BBC star – says on the internet will bounce back and affect the BBC.
The bigger the star, the bigger the reverberations will be. Because the BBC, inevitably, has favourites that it promotes, and Mr Lineker is one of them.
The idea that he could in some way be exempt from rules which the Corporation strives to impose on less famous and celebrated broadcasters is absurd.
The bigger the profile, the bigger the responsibility. What he says will be associated with the national broadcaster.
And on this occasion he trespassed into the simplest and most blatant form of bias. He attacked the Government, in intemperate terms, for a contentious policy that the Labour Opposition rejects.
This is, quite incontestably, bias. He said they were using 'language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s', that is to say Hitler and the Nazis. The suggestion is beyond outrageous, and bears no relation to reality.
It is a crude political insult, especially absurd when directed against a government that is so emphatically multi-racial and non-racist.
This was worse than an own goal, which is generally an accidental blunder. It was almost as if Mr Lineker had stood for a long moment in the mouth of his own team's goal and, with a large smile on his face, booted the ball in hard on behalf of the other side.
He attacked the Government, in intemperate terms, for a contentious policy that the Labour Opposition rejects
Here was clear, unquestionable political bias of the simplest sort, far easier to identify than it would be over less partisan questions such as (say) foreign policy, the transgender issue or drugs.
As the BBC itself has said: 'We have never said that Gary should be an opinion-free zone, or that he can't have a view on issues that matter to him, but we have said that he should keep well away from taking sides on party political
