Dumping Lineker is a move the BBC will live to regret

Watching the flagship BBC News at 10 programme on Monday night, you might have been forgiven for thinking all was well in the world - that Gaza was no longer a killing field, that Ukraine was safe from Putin, that the planet had started to cool down.

- JIM WHITE

Because the second item on the agenda was the news that, from next May, a 63-year-old presenter would no longer be at the helm of a popular weekly television show.

A full six minutes of reporting and analysis were devoted to the fact that Gary Lineker was finishing his 25-year stint on Match of the Day. He’s not even leaving the BBC: he will front live football coverage until the final of the World Cup in 2026. But, still, a bloke’s employment position was reckoned the second most important international news story of the day.

Which, if nothing else, provides conclusive proof that Lineker has become one of those rare figures in broadcasting: he is way bigger than the show he presents.

Indeed, after he comprehensively outflanked the BBC’s director general last March, when his disciplinary suspension for antigovernment social media posts was speedily reversed following the entire football reporting team withdrawing their labour in solidarity, there is an argument that he is bigger than the corporation itself.

Everything about him – from the scale of his salary (in its most recent annual report, the BBC said Lineker earns between £1,350,000 and £1,354,999) through the success of his own broadcasting company, to his political opinions – has become a staple of the news cycle. For some fulminating figures on the right, he has been magnified into the very epitome of the overpaid woke media establishment.