What’s the magic word, Gary?

Gary Lineker, ex-footballer and now the highest-paid BBC employee, came out in defence of illegal refugees braving the rowdy Channel to land on these shores.

Any sensible person would look at the term ‘illegal refugee’ and realise that the magic word there isn’t the noun but the adjective. Anyone doing anything illegal by definition breaks the law which any government, also by definition, is constituted to uphold.

In that spirit, Home Secretary Suella Braverman announced a new policy to stem the flow of illegals landing in Britain. Effectively the policy amounts to a long overdue ban: anyone entering the country illegally will be expelled, blocked from returning in future and disqualified from ever claiming UK citizenship.

I’ve called this measure ‘overdue’ on a purely arithmetical basis. In the past four years the number of such illegal mariners has risen by two orders of magnitude – from around 300 in 2018 to more than 45,000 in 2022.

If the same tendency continues at the same rate, in a few years the homegrown population of London will decrease from its present, already puny, 40 per cent to nothing. London tots will be asking “Mummy, what’s an Englishman?” the way they are already asking “What’s a shilling?”

Yet Gary effortlessly glides over demographic and legal debacles visited on Britain. He doesn’t care about such trivia. What he cares about is sputtering spittle at the Tories.

Hence he effectively accused Mrs Braverman of being a crypto-Nazi. If she were whiter, he’d doubtless charge her with racism as well, but as it is, crypto-Nazi will do to be going on with.

At first, Lineker refrained from drawing historical parallels, simply tweeting: “Good heavens, this is beyond awful.” The Nazism bit was brandished after someone suggested Lineker’s comment was out of order.

That made blood rush to his head, traumatised over the first half of his life by regular contacts with fast-flying heavy balls. “There is no influx,” he wrote. “We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?”

I’m not aware of any Nazi official announcing a policy designed to stem the flow of illigal immigrants into Germany. Neither, I’m sure, is Mr Lineker. His point is that all Tories are Nazis, or at least as bad as. That’s the story, and he won’t let facts interfere with it.

Now, Gary is the kind of person known as ‘limousine liberal’ in America and ‘Bollinger Bolshevik’ in Britain. This breed is characterised by half-baked wokery and overcooked social conscience, all mixed with hatred for anything the Tories (or, in America, Republicans) do.

Unlike others of the same persuasion, Lineker has a ready excuse for his idiocy, one I’ve mentioned but he refuses to offer: the cerebral trauma exacerbated each time he smashed a ball with his forehead. He’ll have to think of some other excuses though, for even his employer, the BBC, is aghast.

If you don’t live in Britain, you may not realise that the BBC accusing a journalist of being too woke is a bit like Pravda, c. 1950, castigating one of its reporters for being too Stalinist.

Lineker has always insisted that his Tweeter account is his chattel to do with as he sees fit. A BBC spokesman disagrees: “The BBC has social media guidance, which is published. Individuals who work for us are aware of their responsibilities relating to social media. We have appropriate internal processes in place if required.”

Yet Gary clearly feels that the BBC needs him more than he needs the BBC. If they don’t like it, they can lump it, and he’ll continue to rake in his millions elsewhere. In that spirit, he has always voiced opinions as inane as they are immoral.

Once, for example, when a Palestinian was shot dead in Israel, Lineker accused the Israelis of the same sin he seems to think Mrs Braverman personifies. Yet the innocent victim of those Israeli Nazis turned out to be a Hamas terrorist.

This time around Mrs Braverman made the mistake of trying to argue with Lineker’s comments. Speaking on his own alma mater, the BBC, she said: “I’m disappointed, obviously. I think it’s unhelpful to compare our measures, which are lawful, proportionate and – indeed – compassionate, to 1930s Germany.”

If you aren’t familiar with official British English, in that jargon ‘unhelpful’ is fully synonymous with ‘asinine’, ‘deranged’ and ‘venomous’. I’d also add ‘irresponsible’ to that sequence, and that’s the most important modifier.

For anyone, especially those with high name recognition, committing his thought to public space takes on a responsibility. He must know that everything he says will be subjected to scrutiny because he is an influencer, that awful word.

Thus he should refrain from promulgating views that are both incendiary and manifestly untrue. If he doesn’t realise they are untrue (in this case, Britain doesn’t take “far fewer refugees than other major European countries”), he should check his facts or ask someone else to do it for him.

Lineker has championed the cause of refugees, legal or otherwise, for a long time – to the point of putting two of them up in his home. That’s a nice gesture, even though I suspect he has more than one residence, and the one into which he welcomed the refugees must be so large that he probably doesn’t even notice their presence.

What Lineker doesn’t seem to realise is that at issue here isn’t just the number of new arrivals but Britain’s sovereignty. One of its key markers is control over the country’s borders, which has become an especially sensitive issue after we left the straitjacket of the EU with its suicidal commitment to free movement of people across national borders.

That commitment hasn’t worked out especially well for EU members. Germany, for example, took in a million Muslims within a couple of recent years, which hospitality has created a crime rate from hell. And Sweden, another welcoming refuge, had a few hundred rapes a year before the influx and some 10,000 now.

It hardly needs saying that Lineker bitterly opposes Brexit. After all, it happened under a Tory administration, which seems to be a sufficient reason. Neither is he evidently a great fan of democracy – more Britons voted for Brexit than for anything else in history.

He is welcome to present a well-argued case for a single European state (good luck to him, for no one else has managed to do so yet) or the more plausible one against plebiscitarian democracy (many others have done so). What should be off-limits for any public figure is frothing at the mouth and spewing out vile unfounded invective.

Still, I hope Lineker keeps his BBC job. He’s a good Match of the Day presenter, and I can’t think of an adequate replacement offhand. However, one hopes his employer will be able to muzzle him when it comes to subjects other than football. He’s sorely unqualified to enlarge on them.