BBC forced to reverse red card

The first thing you notice about BBC director-general Tim Davie is his watch. It’s like a Big Ben on his wrist. Had he spent more time looking at its huge face, he would have seen that the corporation was well into self-inflicted injury time after sacking football pundit Gary Lineker from Match of the Day last week.

Lineker was “stood back” — to use the BBC’s parlance — from the show after tweeting that the language used in the UK’s new asylum seeker bill sounded like Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Lineker, as vocal supporters have pointed out, is a freelance sports commentator and not one of the Beeb’s political reporters, and is therefore not bound by its code of conduct when it comes to what people say on social media.

Meanwhile, the broadcaster has been going on about the need to remain impartial, forgetting that it didn’t call Lineker out when he made comments during the 2022 World Cup about Qatar’s human rights record, and also forgetting that it is already under fire for its chair Richard Sharp helping organise an £800,000 loan for then prime minister Boris Johnson at about the time Sharp was seeking the BBC top job.

Which leads people to the inescapable possibility that the corporation was swayed by political pressure over Lineker. So much for impartiality.

After days of scheduling chaos as other presenters stood themselves back in support of Lineker, the Beeb welcomed him back into the fold.

Because, immigrants be damned, the only thing that matters is not to disrupt the beautiful game.

For on Poverty Rock, sorry, Great Britain, “everything”, as Roman commentator Juvenal noted, “now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses”.