Why there are no winners after the Beeb’s two-footed tackle on Gary Lineker | Barney Ronay

We all lose when the state, no matter how third-hand or arm’s-length, is able to engineer the silence of public figures

Keep politics out of sport. Ha, yeah. Good luck with that. Meanwhile, in what we must, if only out of a sense of convention, call the Real World, we have this: the strange and sinister developments of Friday evening in what will now come to be known as the Lineker affair.

The suspension of Gary Lineker from BBC presenting duties – not Newsnight or Question Time, but the bloodless warm bath of Match of the Day – over a tweet sent on Wednesday afternoon criticising government policy on migrants is, frankly, a jaw-dropping act of political intervention.