David Sillito, the BBC’s media and arts correspondent, had no intention of pussyfooting around the boss. If he thought that being questioned by one of his own employees might guarantee an easy ride, he was swiftly disabused of that notion. Once the statement was released, Mr Davie appeared on television. But Lineker did not commit that undertaking to print. He hoped to include that concession in the statement, indicating that both sides had given ground and reached an “elegant way forward”. But, over the weekend, a decision had been made: Mr Davie would accept the blame in order to draw a line under the affair, quell a staff mutiny and get sports programming back on air.Īs part of the last-minute negotiations, Mr Davie believed he had extracted an undertaking from Lineker not to tweet about politics. “Gary is in favour of such a review,” said Mr Davie. Instead of taking any further action against the sports presenter, the BBC would instead launch a full-scale review of this inadequate guidance with a particular focus on how it applies to freelancers outside of news and current affairs programming. Lineker had been understandably confused by the BBC’s poorly thought-out social media guidelines – the guidelines that Mr Davie had brought in himself, to much fanfare, less than three years ago – and who could blame the Match of the Day host for misinterpreting the rules when they ran into such “grey areas”? I apologise for this,” said Tim Davie, the corporation’s director-general. “Everyone recognises this has been a difficult period for staff, contributors, presenters and, most important, our audiences. The joint statement from the BBC and Lineker, supposedly addressing the presenter’s inflammatory social media use, turned out to be 250 words of apology from the BBC and not one word of it from the corporation’s highest-paid star. On Twitter – where else? – he posted the word “apology” followed by two crying-with-laughter emojis. The depth of the BBC’s capitulation over the Gary Lineker affair was summed up by Gary Neville, the former England player turned football pundit.
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