Look away now: No winners after BBC off-the-ball lunge at Lineker

The fact is everybody loses, everything is diminished, when it is in the gift of the government of the day to decide who gets to say what on issues of basic human kindness

STOOD DOWN: Gary Lineker, who will 'step back' from presenting Match Of The Day. Pic: David Davies/PA Wire.

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 British government policy on migrants is, frankly, a jaw-dropping act of political intervention. Of course both the BBC and the British government will deny that this is an act of direct intervention. The only real response to that is: do you believe them?