Gary Lineker: The Man Who Mistook His Tweets for Perfumed Wisdom

Saint Gary of the Hashtag

At some point in the last ten years — possibly between a quinoa salad and a lukewarm Gunners defeat — Gary Lineker began to believe that his opinions were not simply opinions, but scented missives from a higher plane. Not unlike the Dalai Lama if the Dalai Lama had a BT Sport contract, an Aga, and an unshakeable belief that retweeting Owen Jones could prevent war.

Each tweet, in his mind, was a sort of divine emission: a perfumed, mythically-informed breeze, flavoured heavily with North London Corbynite incense, floating gently across the Twittersphere to bring light unto the unwashed. A fart of such spiritual potency, you half-expected it to come with its own Himalayan gong.

But to the rest of us? They stank.

Not because he was wrong — though he often was — but because he thought he was the Messiah. And not just any Messiah. A vegan, human-rights defending, small-batch olive oil-producing Messiah with a liberal arts degree and a side hustle in woke incense.

The Eton Messiah Complex

Lineker now occupies that elite club of people who think they are not part of the elite. You know the type: makes £1.35 million a year, lives in a house with more en-suites than sense, but still thinks “the system” is oppressing him because someone said he couldn’t call Suella Braverman a proto-fascist on the Beeb’s letterhead.

He’s the kind of man who’ll tweet angrily about Tory sewage policy while soaking in a £20k limestone bathtub filled with hand-harvested oat milk. Who’ll condemn the class system in one breath and then wander off to shoot a Waitrose Christmas advert featuring a distressed carrot and an ethnically diverse choir of rescued donkeys.

Every time someone criticises him, it’s not because he’s wrong — no, no — it’s because they can’t handle the truth. The truth, in this case, being a vague blend of GCSE-level geopolitics, Notting Hill dinner party outrage, and the sort of nuance you normally get from a pub bore halfway through a bottle of Picpoul.

The Digital Vicar at the Church of Virtue-Signalling

Let’s be clear: Gary didn’t tweet, he sermonised. His feed wasn’t a stream of consciousness; it was an ongoing homily to a congregation of Guardian readers who believe hummus should come with a side of policy reform.

The problem is that, like all great prophets of vague morality, he lost track of who he was preaching to. At first it was the converted — the #FBPE crew, middle-aged men in Barbour jackets who think Keir Starmer is a bit too centrist, and that peculiar faction of women named “Louise” who think tweeting angrily counts as a full-time job.

But slowly, inevitably, he began tweeting beyond the pulpit. And the further he strayed into the wider world — Gaza, Israel, Qatar, Brexit, racism, James Cleverly’s holiday packing list — the more he resembled that other iconic British figure: the posh man in a pub toilet who won’t stop talking about Palestine while you’re trying to urinate.

The Rat Emoji Heard Round the World

And so came the rat emoji — the digital equivalent of farting during the two-minute silence. Not intentionally antisemitic, he says. Just... vibe-checkily oblivious. Like tweeting a skull emoji during a funeral and saying, “Well, I thought it was quite on-brand.”

The problem wasn’t just the emoji. It was the whiff of unearned certainty — the idea that this man, who spent his prime years avoiding tackles and promoting salt-and-vinegar crisps, now fancied himself as a cartographer of Middle Eastern ethics. That the same man who once described Danny Welbeck’s movement as intelligent had appointed himself chief analyst on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict via Instagram Reels.

Even the apologies have a certain farty quality — half-hearted, self-pitying, issued not from guilt but from being caught. “I deleted it quickly,” he said, like someone who microwaved fish in the office and tried to hide it with a scented candle.

He’s Not Wrong, Just Incredibly Gary

This is the true heart of the Lineker problem. He’s not always wrong — but he’s always Gary. And Gary comes with a very specific flavour: smug, Islington-baked, coriander-sprinkled outrage, served on a small dish of unearned moral confidence.

You can imagine him at a dinner party, cutting into a beetroot wellington while explaining, without irony, why capitalism is evil — just before a courier delivers his Amazon parcel of organically-sourced, fair trade yoga pants.

Gary means well, which is possibly worse. Because people who mean well and have millions of followers are infinitely more dangerous than people who are just openly awful. At least Piers Morgan knows he’s a bit of a knob. Gary thinks he’s a lighthouse of integrity, valiantly guiding us through the fog of disinformation, while inadvertently steering half the ship into a rock shaped like “well-meaning antisemitism.”

The Final Whistle (and the inevitable Channel 4 gig)

Now, after years of playing hide-and-seek with the BBC’s impartiality guidelines, he’s out. Booted not for the sewage tweets, or Suella, or the endless Brexit whingeing, but for farting into a cultural minefield and then lighting a scented candle to cover it.

Where will he go next? Oh, he’ll be fine. He’ll rebrand as the Footballing Conscience of the Nation. Channel 4 will make a documentary where he visits Gaza wearing cargo shorts and a compassionate frown. He’ll host a podcast with Alastair Campbell called “Left Wing, Right Foot”. Netflix will commission “Gary Lineker: Borderlines”, a 10-part series where he solves global conflict using only VAR and hummus diplomacy.

In Summary: The Ball's in the Wrong Net

Gary Lineker was once a man who put the ball in the net. Now he puts his foot in his mouth, on a near-weekly basis, in front of a digital colosseum of the bemused and the baffled.

He thinks his tweets are scented tributes to human rights. In reality, they’re what happens when you trap a North London liberal in a luxury loft conversion with an iPhone and no editorial oversight.

Still, it’s not the end of the world. As long as there are hashtags to misuse, emojis to misunderstand, and conflicts he doesn't fully grasp but really feels strongly about, Gary will be with us.

Floating above it all. Wreathed in moral gas. Smelling faintly of rose petals and artisanal crisps.