BBC seeks to end crisis by reinstating Gary Lineker as presenter

LONDON – The BBC said sports presenter Gary Lineker would return on air after the corporation agreed to review its social media guidelines to settle an escalating row over its impartiality.

The British broadcaster was forced to axe much of its sports coverage over the weekend after presenters, commentators and pundits refused to work in a show of solidarity with Mr Lineker.

He was suspended for criticising the government’s immigration policy on Twitter. The BBC said Mr Lineker had breached its impartiality rules by comparing the rhetoric of British interior minister Suella Braverman to the language used in 1930s Germany.

But its decision to suspend him led to charges that it had bowed to pressure from the government.

The corporation said on Monday it would now hold a review over how presenters can use social media, with a particular focus on how it applies to freelancers outside news and current affairs.

Mr Lineker tweeted as the news was released, thanking everyone for their support. 

“I have been presenting sport on the BBC for almost three decades and am immeasurably proud to work with the best and fairest broadcaster in the world,” he said, before going on to return to the topic of immigration. 

“A final thought: however difficult the last few days have been, it simply doesn’t compare to having to flee your home from persecution or war to seek refuge in a land far away. It’s heartwarming to have seen the empathy towards their plight from so many of you.” 

BBC director-general Tim Davie said in a statement on Monday that Mr Lineker was a valued part of the BBC, adding: “I look forward to him presenting our coverage this coming weekend.”

As a politically opinionated sports broadcaster for the BBC, Mr Lineker has tangled regularly with the officials. And his stand-off with the BBC has set off a noisy debate over free expression, government influence and the role of a revered, if beleaguered, public broadcaster in an era of polarised politics and freewheeling social media.

The walkout by Mr Lineker’s football colleagues forced the BBC to radically curtail its coverage of a national obsession, reducing the chatty flagship show he usually anchors, Match Of The Day, to 20 commentary-free minutes.

The fallout from the dispute is likely to be wide and long-lasting, casting doubt over the corporation’s management, which has made political impartiality a priority but has faced persistent questions about its own close ties to Britain’s Conservative government.

“All this has put the BBC’s independence at risk, and its reputation at risk,” said London-based media researcher Claire Enders, the founder of Enders Analysis. “That’s unfortunate because this is, at heart, a dispute over whether the BBC can impose its social media guidelines on a contractor.”

Mr Lineker, 62, is no ordinary contractor, of course.

He is perhaps the BBC’s biggest name, a beloved sports figure who moved from the playing field to the broadcasting booth, where he has been a weekly fixture since 1999, analysing games and shooting the breeze with other retired sports stars. He earned £1.35 million (S$2.2 million) in 2022, making him the BBC’s highest-paid on-air personality.

But Mr Lineker, who grew up in a working-class family in Leicester, has never kept his views on social issues a secret. When the government announced strict new immigration plans, he tweeted: “This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?”

Ms Braverman, who is spearheading the policy to stop migrants from crossing the English Channel in small boats, said Mr Lineker’s comments diminished the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Other Conservative lawmakers said he had misused his BBC platform – not for the first time – to voice a political opinion.

“We need to make sure we maintain that trust in the independence and impartiality of the BBC,” Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt said on Sunday to a BBC journalist, Ms Laura Kuenssberg.

What makes Mr Lineker’s case especially complicated is both his job status – a contractor, not a full-time employee, who works for BBC Sports as opposed to BBC News – and the broadcaster’s enforcement of its social media guidelines, which critics say is haphazard at best and hypocritical at worst.

Mr Alan Sugar, a British businessman who hosts the BBC’s version of the American reality TV show The Apprentice, has tweeted vociferously against a union leader who has pursued a confrontation with the government, as well as against a former leader of the Labour Party, Mr Jeremy Corbyn, whom Mr Lineker had also criticised.

Mr Lineker got into no apparent trouble with his bosses about that, or for speaking out on the air about human rights abuses in Qatar during his coverage of the World Cup football tournament there in 2022.

Critics say the double standard extends to programming, citing the fact that the BBC will not air a nature documentary inspired by Wild Isles, a new series narrated by revered nature broadcaster David Attenborough.

Ms Enders suggested that the BBC might be worried that the film, which deals with threats to Britain’s environment and explores the concept of rewilding, would draw fire from the political right.

The BBC denied that, saying the documentary had been commissioned separately from Wild Isles and was never destined for television. It said it would be available on its iPlayer streaming service.

The broadcaster is compromised in other ways, according to critics.

The chair of the BBC’s board, former Goldman Sachs investment banker Richard Sharp, is a donor to the Conservative Party and is being investigated for his role in the arrangement of a loan of £800,000 for Mr Boris Johnson, the prime minister at the time Mr Sharp was appointed.

Mr Sharp has resisted calls to step down, but the questions about his ties to Mr Johnson have made it hard for him to play the normal role of a chairman in a crisis, which would be to handle government and opposition leaders, letting the BBC’s director-general, Mr Davie, focus on internal problems.

Mr Davie, a former marketing executive who also has links to the Conservative Party, has come under fire for his handling of the dispute with Mr Lineker.

In an interview with the BBC, he apologised for the spiralling crisis, which forced the broadcaster to all but scrap two days of sports programming.

“This has been a tough time for the BBC,” Mr Davie said.

Mr Davie, who was appointed during the Johnson government, has made upholding the BBC’s political impartiality one of his major goals as director-general. He denied that the broadcaster was bowing to pressure from the government or Conservative politicians, and said he had no plans to resign.

Political rows between the government and the BBC go back almost to the broadcaster’s founding.

It is not the first time that the BBC, under Mr Davie, has been accused of bending to pressure, though not always in the same direction. In 2020, it was criticised by Mr Johnson and other Tories for announcing it would strip lyrics from two well-known patriotic songs during an annual televised concert.

The lyrics, some said, evoked a British colonial past and were at odds with the Black Lives Matter movement then sweeping the West. The BBC later reversed the decision.

Mr Johnson has never hesitated to put the BBC in the crosshairs. In 2021, his government leaped on the broadcaster after one of its hosts gently mocked a Cabinet minister for appearing in an interview with a large Union Jack behind him.

A few days later, the government decreed that the flag should fly on all government buildings every day of the year, rather than simply on designated days.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, however, has shown less of an appetite for these battles.

Last Saturday, he said that “Gary Lineker was a great footballer and is a talented presenter”, and that he hoped the stand-off with the BBC could be settled. “It is rightly a matter for them, not the government,” he said of the BBC.

For Mr Sunak, the furore may have had an unintended dividend – deflecting scrutiny of a policy that, while popular with his Conservative base, contains provisions that are likely to draw criticism on human rights grounds. NYTIMES, REUTERS