Has Gary earned his lesson?

IT was less than three years ago that the BBC came under fire after the publication of its top earners’ salaries. The corporation’s discomfort was compounded by one of those top earners, Gary Lineker, then affecting jokey outrage on social media that his £1.8 million pay packet was smaller than that of his then fellow Beeb employee Chris Evans.

My, how we licence fee-payers laughed, as I observed at the time.

So it has been genuinely amusing this time to see Lineker, below, getting it in the neck from some quarters after suggesting that the licence fee should be voluntary – because he’s absolutely right about it being the BBC’s “fundamental problem”.

In an age of multiple channels there’s absolutely no justification for a poll tax to prop up just one of them.

I’d happily shell out for a year’s supply of Would I Lie ToYou, The Repair Shop, and especially Johnnie Walker’s Sounds Of The Seventies on Radio 2, but such payment should take the form of a subscription, not a compulsory demand for which you can go to prison for not meeting.

The BBC is a little like the Sports Personality Of TheYear Lineker hosts: a fondly recalled institution that these days you’re not that bothered if you don’t watch.

I CAN understand the attention devoted to the entire hospitals built in little more than a week by China during its coronavirus crisis.

What baffles me is the praise and admiration expressed for the breakneck construction in

some quarters. Any authoritarian surveillance state, for whom workers’ rights are of no more consideration than free speech, could do the same. As the democracy protesters we do so little to support in Hong Kong could tell you.