Gary Lineker has insisted his controversial tweet about the government’s asylum policy – which led to his temporary suspension as Match of the Day host – was “factually accurate” and “fair”.
The BBC took its most highly paid presenter off air last month after he claimed that the language the government used in discussing its migration plans was not dissimilar to that used in 1930s Germany.
Fellow presenters boycotted the programme in solidarity with Lineker, who later resumed his role without having apologised.
At the height of the row over the BBC’s impartiality, those in charge of the corporation launched an independent review of its social media guidance for freelancers.
Lineker has now said he stands by his comments, adding that, when new social media guidance was introduced by BBC director general Tim Davie in 2020, he agreed he would not stop “occasionally” tweeting about two issues – climate change and refugees.
“I’ve worked with refugees’ charities for years. So, when I saw the Suella Braverman film, I said I thought it was pretty awful,” he told Alastair Campbell during an interview for Men’s Health UK magazine.
“When I sent that tweet, it honestly never even crossed my mind that it would lead to where it went.
“Then the ‘stick to football’ people weighed in, and I replied to one of them, just saying there was no massive influx [of refugees], the UK takes far fewer refugees than other European countries, this is a cruel policy, and the language used in the debate reminds us of the debate in Germany in the 1930s.
“I think that is factually accurate.”
He went on: “I wasn’t prepared to back down on that, especially as I felt and still feel that what I tweeted was fair and true.
“I wasn’t abusive, I wasn’t saying she [Braverman] was a Nazi. I talked about the use of words like ‘invasion’ and ‘swarms’ and ‘criminals’ and ‘rapists’, which I think we should be very careful about because it has real-life consequences.”
In the clip that started the row, in which she discussed the Illegal Migration Bill, home secretary Ms Braverman said the UK asylum system had been overwhelmed and that hotel accommodation for migrants was costing nearly £7m a day. She claimed it was not fair that people who had travelled through other safe countries could “game the system”.
Tory MPs called Lineker’s comments “foul, ill-conceived and disgraceful”, and Downing Street said they were unacceptable.
The row was raised in the Commons when Sir Keir Starmer urged Rishi Sunak at Prime Minister’s Questions to “stand up to his snowflake MPs waging war on free speech” as the Labour leader attacked backbench attempts to “cancel a broadcaster”.
Lineker said that after he had been taken off air by the BBC, he had found it “hard to see how it [could be] resolved unless they backed down”.
He said: “To be fair to Tim Davie, he admitted they had got it wrong and sorted it out.”
The presenter has been consistently critical of the Conservatives. Less than an hour after Boris Johnson’s legal defence to the Partygate inquiry was published, he tweeted about people who “constantly tell fibs”.
