Gary Lineker’s treatment exposes fact that image of warm, fuzzy BBC was always a lie

For almost 50 years MI5 had agents embedded at the BBC, vetting job candidates with the specific aim of weeding out prospective left-leaning employees. It was known as the “Christmas Tree” process, after the discreet symbol on a personnel file that would advise executives that a particular individual was to be blacklisted. The practice continued well into the 80s, and until a 1985 Observer exposé was denied at all levels.

Perhaps this jars a little with the warm and fuzzy image of the BBC that has been bequeathed to us over the generations. This lovable national treasure, informed by the sacred mission of its founder Lord Reith, a humming hive of family entertainment and artistic monuments and the Sports Report theme tune and David Attenborough cuddling gorillas, a place that expresses the best of us and represents all of us. And it strikes me that many of the strong feelings generated by the treatment of Gary Lineker over the past week originate in this ideal: a honeyed, romanticised BBC that has only ever really existed in the imagination.

Take Reith himself, for example: a man who has become synonymous with the noble benevolence of public service broadcasting. Reith was a fascist sympathiser. He spoke with open admiration of the rise of Mussolini in Italy. After the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, he wrote: “I really admire the way Hitler has cleaned up what looked like an incipient revolt,” which – to borrow a phrase – is language not entirely dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 1930s.

There has been a good deal of talk in recent days about independence and free speech, about not necessarily agreeing with what Lineker says but defending his right to say it, much of which is based on the thinly veiled fallacy that the BBC has ever been a truly impartial space. And what, on reflection, did we ever expect from an organisation that owes its very existence to the consent of those in power? What kind of world were the 17 white men who have served as its director general – 12 of them privately educated, 11 of them Oxbridge graduates, eight of them former military personnel – ever going to construct?

Perhaps the same world that fired Kenny Everett in the 70s for making a joke about the wife of a Conservative government minister, and reprimanded Tony Blackburn for railing with the utmost seriousness at striking miners. Perhaps the same world in which the security services get to decide who writes your news bulletins. Perhaps the same world in which Andrew Neil can anchor political coverage while being chairman of a rightwing magazine, while the presenter of a football highlights show can be suspended for criticising a rightwing government policy.

Gary Lineker’s colleagues showed solidarity by stepping away from their BBC roles while he was suspended. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

This has always been a playground of establishment power, and yet if the surreal last few days teach us anything it is that the terms of engagement may be shifting. Perhaps Dion Dublin really does have strong feelings on the UK’s obligations under the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. Perhaps Alan Shearer genuinely thinks the new Illegal Migration Bill undermines our credibility to advocate human rights abroad. More likely, however, that they intuited something more elemental: a kind of corporate condescension, the unanswerable arrogance of a boss class that has never really valued them as people.

So they kicked out. You may take our plush sofas. You may take our slow-mo replays and Opta stats. But you’ll never take our freedom. And they won! An unapologetic Lineker will be back on our screens this weekend, flanked by his comrades-in-arms. The director general Tim Davie – conservative, privately educated, Cambridge, decent sort of chap – has been humiliated. And for all the alarmist rhetoric, the BBC’s response to Lineker has been entirely in keeping with its proud 100-year history of suppressing non-establishment viewpoints. The only difference is that these discussions are no longer occurring in sealed files behind numbered office doors, but in public, where everyone can hear you scream.

For the right, the BBC has always been a safe space (not that it ever stopped them complaining about it). Now, suddenly, this space is contested. So perhaps one of the reasons they are reacting so apoplectically to the tweets of a football presenter is the loss of control they represent. It would never have occurred to Kenneth Wolstenholme or Michael Parkinson or Bruce Forsyth to compare the government of the day to the Nazis. That it is now possible to do so – to be successful and popular and anti-establishment and correct all at once – is a prospect that scares the life out of them.

And for all the faults of the BBC, it too has been on a journey. The organisation that Greg Dyke described as “hideously white” has gone from 2% non-white management in 2000 to 12% in 2020. A woman presents Football Focus. And even in the circular absurdity of BBC journalists interviewing BBC executives on BBC policy, there is at least an attempt at the transparency and self-reflection so absent in commercial media. Where did I read about the Christmas Tree files and Lord Reith’s Nazi sympathies? The BBC website.

For decades the chimera of impartiality has bound the BBC while strengthening its enemies. If Lineker’s last stand has achieved anything, it is to expose this as the conservative fiction it always was. Why be impartial when you can be right? Why carry on pretending that cruelty and empathy are equal arguments deserving equal weight? Perhaps it took a bunch of ex-footballers to expose the brutal truth of politics: in a battleground of power, the only thing that really matters is winning.