Gary Lineker: how virtue-signalling rots the soul His embrace of Israelophobia reveals the useful idiocy of the centrist dads. Tom Slater
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/19/gary-lineker-how-virtue-signalling-rots-the-soul/
We’ve seen the most mediocre minds of a generation destroyed by virtue-signalling. Gary Lineker – now out of the BBC, after he ‘accidentally’ shared an anti-Semitic Instagram post – is a grimly instructive example of a moralising centrist dad whose thirst for retweets led him down a deranged and dark path. A man who has swanned effortlessly from raging against Brexit to comparing the Tories to the Nazis to reposting an ‘anti-Zionist’ video that included an image of a rat, a quintessential piece of Nazi-era, Jew-hating propaganda. Apparently, Gary’s famed ability to detect resonances of the 1930s – he once accused Suella Braverman’s immigration rhetoric of being positively Goebbels-esque – failed him on this occasion.
A formal statement is expected today, announcing Lineker’s departure from the BBC’s football coverage. He had already agreed to leave Match of the Day at the end of the football season – the show he has helmed since 1999, shortly after his dazzling playing career had ended – but he was due to stay on for the 2026 World Cup. Since Lineker shared that despicable post, by a group called Palestine Lobby, things have finally hit breaking point. Even an ‘unreserved’ apology – claiming his amplification of an age-old anti-Semitic trope was an ‘accident’ for which he takes ‘full responsibility’ – wasn’t enough to keep his already acrimonious relationship with the Beeb intact.
There are those who are trying to present this as a free-speech issue – largely people who have hitherto expressed no interest in the subject and have actually led high-profile cancellation crusades in the past. Woke leftist Owen Jones – who led the charge to get Toby Young pushed out of a government appointment – has declared his solidarity with Lineker, claiming ‘the BBC has driven out one of their most popular stars for opposing genocide’. Even though Israel’s war against Hamas is not a genocide and Lineker has actually been kicked out for reposting material straight out of Der Stürmer. By OJ’s wonky standards that doesn’t render you unfit for taxpayer-funded work, but jokes about tits on Twitter 10 years ago absolutely does.
The issue at hand here is BBC impartiality, and whether or not the pretence of it will hold up if the broadcaster’s most high-profile and well-paid star continues to use the perch given to him by licence-fee payers to signal-boost high-status, bigoted opinions. It’s a tricky line to draw, for sure. Especially where freelancers and non-news personalities, like Lineker, are concerned. If the BBC sacked a presenter every time he or she said something dumb on social media they’d soon have none left.
I’m sure everyone would have preferred this to be resolved more amicably. Something that became increasingly untenable as Lineker continued to push his luck, even signing a letter demanding the BBC reinstate a Gaza documentary it had removed from the iPlayer after it was revealed the main subject of it was actually the son of a Hamas official. But unless you assume impartiality simply does not apply to those with the ‘correct’ opinions, as presumably Team Lineker does, it was obviously going to come to a head at some point.
Indeed, Lineker now joins a rogues’ gallery of presenters who have left the BBC in large part because it wouldn’t allow them to propagandise rather than inform, educate and entertain. Emily Maitlis, now of The News Agents podcast, flounced out of the corporation in 2022, accusing BBC leadership of being in the grip of a pro-Tory cabal – seemingly because it wasn’t happy with her accusing Rod Liddle of ‘casual racism’ or savaging Dominic Cummings on-air while pretending to be impartial. There is a suite of prominent broadcasters who perceive any attempt at balance as a kind of sop to the forces of Brexity, right-wing, even Zionist, reaction.
The irony being that – in Lineker’s case – his pursuit of social-media glow, his apparent inability to think outside the simplistic narratives on his phone screen, has made him blind to one of the most reactionary movements on Earth, and the moral necessity of defeating it. Namely, the genocidal anti-Semites of Hamas. He’s the walking, talking embodiment of the proverbial empty vessel that makes the loudest noise. Here is a man who seems to have given zero thought to Israel-Palestine prior to 7 October, and even now seems to be getting his takes almost exclusively from viral videos. And yet, such is his compulsion to appear righteous, he will parrot any old rubbish, even if it turns out to be wrong and heinous.
Virtue-signalling really does rot the soul, and the mind.
Comments are closed.
