Tories ready to show Lineker red card if Euros host breaks BBC bias rules
MATCH of the Day’s Gary Lineker will be ‘watched like a hawk’ during the Euro 24 tournament because of his history of making politically charged comments, Tory sources have warned.
The BBC presenter was at the centre of an extraordinary row last year, when the Corporation was forced to pull him from the football highlights show after he posted comments on social media criticising the Government’s asylum policy.
Euro 24 kicks off in Germany on June 14 and runs for a month – meaning Lineker, 63, will take centre stage for the final three weeks of the election campaign.
He was suspended by the BBC after refusing to apologise for a tweet in which he compared language around the Government’s small-boats policy to that used in Nazi Germany.
Lineker has also been criticised for his tweets in support of the pro-Palestine marches – where some demonstrators brandish anti-Semitic placards showing the Star of David being thrown in a bin or a swastika inside the Israeli flag – and said: ‘Marching and calling for a ceasefire and peace so that more innocent children don’t get killed is not really the definition of a hate march.’
A party source said: ‘Millions will be watching him – but we will do so like a hawk.’
Following a review of the BBC’s social media guidelines by former news executive John Hardie, they were revamped to allow hosts of ‘crown jewel’ shows, including Match of the Day, to continue to take political stances publicly so long as they didn’t endorse or attack either political parties or politicians.
Last night, the BBC stressed that during the election period, Lineker would be bound by the rules which apply to ‘Flagship Programme Presenters’ when the country is about to go to the polls.
The rules, which ban the endorsement or criticism of a political party or the ‘character of individual politicians’, state that ‘those presenting Flagship Programmes carry a particular responsibility to help balance commitments to both freedom of expression and impartiality... (and) don’t comment on any issue that is a matter of political debate during the election period for UK general elections and for referendums in any part of the UK.’