“Basically I’m pretty boring, I think,” Gary Lineker told Sue Lawley after choosing his Desert Island Discs in September of 1990 when all of England was still swooning over the arresting, teary adventure of its national football team in that summer’s World Cup.
And on the evidence of that radio broadcast, he wasn’t half: easily the most diffident and unflappable interviewee since a young Kate Bush decided it would be a good idea to appear on Noel Edmund’s Swap Shop. When you listen now, it is hard to imagine what possessed Lineker to ‘do’ Desert Island, apart from its being a venerable English institution and that his participation would probably please his parents.
The England striker’s immaculately polite, reserved conversational style eventually led a faintly vexed Lawley to conclude that her guest was ‘rather saint-like.’ Still, it did contain one of the most deliciously-English introductions of all time: “Born almost thirty years ago, the son of a fruit and veg’ merchant, his life might have been unremarkable but for one outstanding ability: he could play football.”
How Margaret Thatcher must have chortled in triumph: it was the ultimate validation of the nation of shopkeepers.
So what happened? How did England’s perpetual Head Boy become the scourge of UKIP, a hate figure for The Sun and quite possibly the last living leftie in the BBC? How come, a quarter of a century after his turn in on BBC radio, Lawley’s ‘good, clean, lad’ was this week moved to advise a communicant on Twitter: ‘I don’t follow you. You follow me. Maybe you just fuck off.’
(Hear, from somewhere now, the ghostly echo of John ‘Motty’ Motson: “Oh, and it’s a dangerous ball...And Lineker: Linnnnn-e-kaaaaar...’).
Through one tweeted comment, Lineker found himself the flash point of the fierce domestic debate on the issue of migrants arriving into England from Calais: “The treatment by some towards these young refugees is hideously racist and utterly heartless. What is happening to our country?”
Naturally, it was the declaration which prompted a deluge of predictable venom, outrage and worse. But, of course, the question he posed was more interesting and incendiary. It is, surely, a significant moment when England’s all time leading World Cup finals goal-scorer and a man who effortlessly glided from the football field onto the BBC’s most famous Saturday evening sofa despairs aloud about the direction his country is taking.
And he is echoing a question that millions of people living in England, from those who can trace their roots back to 1066 to those born elsewhere, have been asking themselves in the wake of Brexit.
The tense atmosphere and fixed viewpoints over the Calais migrant scheme is the latest episode in the narrowing of attitudes towards immigrants and England. Lineker came under specific fire for appearing to support adult migrants seeking to gain entry as minors, with Tory MP David Davis offering the sinister suggestion that migrants should be subjected to dental checks in order to verify their age.
The Sun newspaper weighed in with a front page story declaring that the BBC was under pressure to sack “the jug-eared Match of the Day host”. Davis questioned whether he should be retained in the role while Ukip’s Patrick O’Flynn, again by tweet, commented that if Lineker wants ‘to be a Lib-Left political voice then fair enough. But get him of MOTD please. Time to pass baton to Jermaine Jenas anyway.’
Of course Ukip’s members have, in football parlance, been waiting in the long grass for Lineker anyhow ever since his April 2015 tweet, when Brexit was still a vaguely fantastical nightmare: ‘Always reluctant to offer a political comment but Farage is a d**k’. The insult was temporarily retracted and then reiterated on the night of the Brexit vote.
But the essence of Lineker’s complaint this week wasn’t concerned with whether those seeking asylum were under or over eighteen: it was that they are people, in dire and desperate need. The BBC, for its part, issued a statement that their front man would not be getting the axe, despite complaints that his stark viewpoint contravened all acceptable guidelines of impartiality. BBC’s argument that he is a freelance broadcaster may be strictly true but also a bit rich given that next January’s government charter, which will release Beeb salaries into the public domain, is likely to reveal Lineker as the highest paid of their cast of front of house ‘talent.’
But Lineker’s tangle with the England’s ascendant isolationist movement once again casts Leicester’s most famous son in an interesting light. Just who is Gary Lineker?
At one level, he remains a more mature version of the Desert Island Disc guest, mixing it with Shear-ah and other old mates on MOTD and engaging in a form of cosy bantz that leaves the programme open to derision.
The prolific analysis-specialist live coverage on Sky and BT Sport etc, who scrutinise a corner kick like it’s the eighth wonder of the world, can make MOTD look frothy in comparison.
You can argue that there has always been a trace of caustic soda beneath Lineker’s veneer of safe telly front man. Equally you can point out that he always makes sure the joke is never fully on him. For instance, he was true to his promise to present MOTD ‘in his undies’ if his beloved Leicester won the Premier League. But he appeared in what may have been the most pristine pair of (Leicester-logoed) boxers seen on small screen since Nick Kamen walked into a Laundromat.
Still, just when it seemed like the whole thing was an exercise in vanity, he went onto introduce the show in completely deadpan manner, making no reference to how he was undressed. As TV frontman-ship went, the moment took chutzpah. Then there is his off-camera demeanour and his Twitter persona, which carries a sting heavy and light and which, this week, has rendered him both saviour and hate figure.
To those of us watching from afar, this seems like a precarious time for good old Blighty. Labour is slowly imploding. Brexit did for David Cameron and the big society and his legacy seems to lie in pushing Thatcher all the way in the Historical Writers’ Association pool for the worst PM of all time. England, let alone Britain, is fractured. So who would have guessed, in the aftermath of Italia ‘90, that Gary Winston Lineker (b 1960), the tanned, chirpy striker of that England team would, a quarter of a century later, emerge in this fraught time as a protestor for the vulnerable and someone who can voice a sense of anger and despair in a way that rings clear above the ineffectual din of the politicians? Maybe getting sacked from the BBC might be the best thing that could happen to him. Maybe there is much more in him than England has seen.
For the record, Lineker’s discs were straight from the Shoot! magazine school of music, ranging from Rod Stewart to Dire Straits. Even when he picked a bona fide genius in Elton John, he still managed to play his worst ever song. However, the music he chose to bring with him to the desert island was ‘Soul Limbo’, the Booker T. tune that became a household favourite in Britain when it was adapted by the BBC’s test cricket programme. Lineker dreamed of having the tune playing as he indulged in cricket against the bowls machine- his one luxury item. In sound and vision, it is an island coloured with outside influences - the very opposite to the island that many in England now want.
The leftie in Lineker was there all along.
