Of the tortuous and tragic conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, Lineker has chosen to see neither the tortuousness nor the tragedy. “People say it’s a complex issue,” he has declared, “but I don’t think it is.”

What then does Lineker see that others don’t? Or is it a question of what Lineker doesn’t see that others do? Either way, he has consistently promulgated an unwaveringly unsubtle pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist position, for which he has doughtily refused to apologize. Why should he? Wherein has he sinned? It is not as though he is an antisemite. Has not truth alone — truth at its most simple and unvarnished — been his guide?

But to go to war armed only with simplicity is to go to war naked. Not everyone will notice. Those whose nakedness you retweet certainly won’t. And in your own eyes, there is no knowing what richly-attired heroism you see. But in the eyes of those who believe, with the poet Donne, that on a huge hill, cragged and steep, truth stands, and he that will reach her about must and about must go — the once prolific goalscorer looks ill-equipped to be a traveler among the rocky uplands of veracity.

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“A rat, a rat!” Not a real rat, but an emoji. There, unashamedly wagging its tail for all to see, in the body of another of Lineker’s retweeted pro-Palestinian posts. “An antisemitic trope so brazen,” in the words of The Sunday Times commentator Matthew Syed, “that I shan’t insult your intelligence by explaining why this is so.”

Brazen it might be, but Lineker misses it. Doesn’t see it. Doesn’t get it. Knows nothing of the long history of the rat in the iconography of Jew-loathing, a motif of particular appeal to the Nazis who could depict their ambition to wipe out the Jews as hygienic, since rats, as we all know, spread disease.

Which matters in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict why? Because whoever would talk of Zionism should know a little of what it was invented to save Jews from.

It isn’t difficult to see why the post in question initially excited Lineker’s interest. “Zionism explained in two minutes,” it promised. A bit long, given Lineker’s refusal to see complexity, but the explanation when it comes takes only two seconds. “They take the land claim that it’s theirs.”

Gross enough as history without the rat emoji, with it there can hardly be any doubt, unless you’re Lineker, about the status of this two-second “explanation”. The rat, so potent a symbol for the Nazis, has a new home in Arab propaganda. The Jew is once again the object of exterminationist ambition.

Whatever causes Lineker to realize at last what he’s put his name to — he a man, remember, with no malice against the Jews — he deletes the post and apologizes. Bish, bash, bosh. No harm done. He didn’t know, that was all. Maybe all he saw was a cute mouse, wagging its tail. Credit where credit’s due. He acted. And said sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

But sorry for what exactly?

For being found out? For not recognizing one of the Nazis’ most infamous images? For briefly seconding the words of a Palestinian with whom the idea of the Jew as vermin sits easily.

None of us are as educated as we should be. And Lineker’s ignorance matters only because he charges into the fray of a bitter conflict without knowing, or wanting to know, anything of it apart from what can be gleaned from a two-second video produced by a party to one side whose only aim is to debase the other.

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Lineker shouldn’t have needed the rat to tell him that the thing he “shared” was odious. But you never know what form enlightenment is going to take. So listen to the rat, Gary. This is what it was trying to tell you. Dislike Zionism in its present iteration all you like, but to comment on what or why it is when you have scant knowledge of the murderous hatred that made it necessary — the desperation of exile and longing for home that finally brought it about — is like passing judgment on Black Lives Matter unaware there was a slave trade. You feel for the agony of the Palestinians, you say. Your compassion is admirable. Though compassion with understanding would be more admirable still. To be silent is to be complicit, you say. That is not a free pass to froth and fulminate all you like. To be ignorant is to be complicit too.

And now that you have admitted and apologized for what you were unaware of on this occasion, what about an apology for all those earlier know-nothing interventions you have made? Close your eyes and imagine a rat waving its tail at the bottom of every page you’ve posted. That’s a thousand sorries you owe us, Gary.

Oh, and put some clothes on.

***

A version of this piece first appeared on Howard Jacobson’s Substack, Streetwalking with Howard Jacobson.

Nothing works anymore. There are shortages of fruit and vegetables; energy is cripplingly expensive; strikes have become an everyday occurrence. Then there are the NHS, the railways and the Post Office. Match of the Day and, by extension, the BBC, is just another great institution run into the ground. But its collapse also reveals something about football and its place in society, its potential as a locus of dissent.

On 2 May 1953, the great cricket writer Neville Cardus went to Lord’s to watch the opening first-class match of the season: the MCC against Yorkshire, the champion county. “Play was not possible until 3.15pm,” he noted glumly in a letter to the Times. “Then the players came into the field and in an hour 20-odd runs were scored without a sign of a daring gesture, without a hint of personal relish.”

Nine miles to the west, at Wembley, Bolton Wanderers led Blackpool 3-1 in the FA Cup final. It looked like the 38-year-old Stanley Matthews, widely regarded as the best footballer in England, was again going to be denied the first medal of his career. But in the half-hour that followed, Matthews inspired a fightback and Blackpool won 4-3. Journalists, breaking all codes of etiquette, stood on their seats to applaud one of the most emotional of victories. As Cardus left Lord’s and ran into excited fans leaving Wembley, he spoke of his fear that cricket would “gradually disappear, not greatly lamented, into profound oblivion”. When Geoffrey Green, in his report of the FA Cup final in the same paper, spoke of football as “the game of the people”, Cardus said he felt he could no longer argue.

Although commentary of the FA Cup final had been available on the BBC World Service, the BBC Light Programme carried commentary on only the second half, preferring to cover the touring Australians at Leicester and a championship match between Hampshire and Essex. It wouldn’t happen again. What really hammered home football’s advantage was the fact that, for the first time, it had reached a mass television audience, as many people buying televisions for the Coronation did so a month early to watch Matthews and his last shot at silverware. As Martin Kelner argues in Sit Down and Cheer, this was the day when football supplanted cricket as the national sport.

FA Cup final coverage on BBC soon became a staple and, in 1964, Match of the Day was broadcast for the first time. Football, suddenly, was taken into people’s homes on a weekly basis. It became possible to see teams and players without actually going to the ground. Football became a mass cultural phenomenon.

Football was initially sceptical about television. The 1968 League Cup final between Leeds and Arsenal, for instance, wasn’t screened live for fear of reducing the attendance at Wembley, while for years the league games whose highlights would be broadcast were kept secret. But England’s World Cup success and the emergence of George Best, the first bona fide footballing celebrity, intensified the relationship, which soon became symbiotic. What was cause and what was effect is difficult to say, but in the late Sixties and early Seventies, English football was blessed with an array of colourful and controversial managers: Brian Clough, Bill Shankly, Don Revie, Tommy Docherty, Malcolm Allison. It became a great soap opera that was just about able to withstand the worst years of hooliganism that followed.

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And it was television that offered an escape from the dark years of the Eighties, as Sky funded the breakaway Premiership in 1992. Even then, though, Match of the Day remained: highlights on free-to-air were essential for awareness of the product. Football gentrified, stadiums became less unpleasant and gradually its worldwide appeal took the game away from its roots. Thanks to television, football became a case study of globalisation. Match of the Day had made it easier to support a club from afar — you could follow Manchester United or Liverpool and have a reasonable idea of how they played without ever visiting Old Trafford or Anfield. But over the last couple of decades, as the Premier League has been aggressively marketed overseas, this process has accelerated.

On the one hand, English football is a tremendous success story, a potent tool of soft power. Hundreds of millions watch each week, with the result that audiences from Argentina to Ethiopia have a vague understanding of such disparate places as Burnley, Hull and Swansea. But on the other, this leads to tensions between the demands and expectations of, say, Chelsea fans in Ghana or Japan, and those who haven’t missed a game at Stamford Bridge in 30 years. To whom a club belongs seems a fundamental question with implications far beyond football.

And that’s why football has become so important. It offers a sense of community and identity, but it is also as close to universal as anything can be. Football brings broader, often intangible, issues into focus. Politicians recognise this. That’s why the Government intends to create a regulator for football when the economics alone make the expense hard to justify. It’s why, when Roman Abramovich was sanctioned, Chelsea were treated as a special case rather than simply having their trading suspended. And it’s why oligarchs, sheikhs and petrostates are so eager to involve themselves in the game.

Which brings us to the Lineker Affair and the absurdity of the fall-out from a sports presenter’s tweet about the language surrounding the Government’s immigration policy. It’s hard to discuss, because while it’s about fundamental issues of free speech and government policy, it’s also about a former Leicester striker being able to guide Martin Keown and Danny Murphy through a discussion about VAR.

Quite apart from anything else, it’s striking just how badly the BBC management has handled this. Journalism is a precarious and far-from-lucrative business. But the one class of people in the industry who have a level of financial security are the former players who serve as pundits. And football is based on mateship and not letting the team down. Once Ian Wright had withdrawn from Match of the Day in solidarity with Lineker, there was little doubt that others would follow; it was football’s “I’m Sporticus” moment.

What was perhaps less foreseeable was that commentators would then follow. And it turns out that watching three minutes of highlights without commentary is a weirdly alienating experience. Even for those of us who cover the game professionally, identifying Dango Ouattara or Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall or Max Wöber with little context in a clip of five or six seconds is extremely difficult. If nothing else, and despite John Redwood’s unconvincing tweet to the contrary, what this affair has demonstrated is just how necessary commentators are.

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And by suspending Lineker, the BBC leadership has shone a light on itself. That it is either craven or hypocritical is undeniable. Some will believe this is all part of a Right-wing plot to undermine the BBC, to make people ask what exactly the licence fee is for. At the very least, there is a growing recognition that it’s a bit rich for a former advisor to Theresa May (Robbie Gibb), a Conservative donor who helped arrange a loan to Boris Johnson (Richard Sharp), and a former Conservative councillor (Tim Davie) to be preaching about impartiality. Nobody, surely, is surprised this storm has blown up over comments from Lineker, rather than by a BBC freelancer of more Right-wing views such as Alan Sugar or Andrew Neil.

Rishi Sunak’s statement on Saturday, contradicting a number of his MPs, including the culture secretary Lucy Frazer, seemed intended to distance the Government from Lineker’s suspension and to paint it as an internal BBC affair. It suggests he feels public opinion may be on Lineker’s side. Yet the danger now for the BBC is that this spreads beyond sport. Might others at the broadcaster concerned by this issue take action? Can the BBC back down or at least find a workable fudge? And if it does not, will Match of the Day survive? Who, credibly, could present it now?

Lineker’s hand is strong: he is 62, highly respected and co-owns a successful production company. With BT Sport and Discovery merging to form TNT, there’s a high-profile presenting job still unfilled for next season. His decision to go to watch Leicester play Chelsea on Saturday was, whether conscious or not, reminiscent of Brian Clough’s appearance at Derby vs Leicester days after Derby had sacked him. He was pointedly relaxed and, as with Clough, fans took the opportunity to demonstrate their support for him.

The Premier League, presumably, is not impressed about its product being overshadowed, with its coverage reduced to a perfunctory 20 minutes. BBC Sport is already a shell of what it used to be. It’s lost the cricket, the golf, the rugby league and the Formula One. If it were to lose the Premier League highlights as well, its days as a serious sports broadcaster would effectively be over, prompting further questions about the value of the licence fee.

Six decades ago, through Match of the Day, the BBC took football into people’s homes and elevated itself to a whole new level of popularity. It may now be that football, through Match of the Day, destroys the BBC, or at least forces it to consider the extent to which its credibility has been damaged by the present leadership. Football has outgrown its nurturer to become a powerful political force in its own right — and nobody quite knows how to tame it.

Hypocrisy is the easiest vice to diagnose because one only has to hold one’s rhetorical opponents to their standards and need not articulate one’s own. If you charge me with a sin, moreover, but then prove to have committed it yourself, your shame spares me the burden of defending myself.

This is not to claim that hypocrisy has no immoral implications. It is almost inevitably an act of deception — and a demand that others meet standards one is either unwilling or incapable of meeting. All of us are hypocrites, to some extent, inasmuch as it is easier to say something than do it, but that does not make it right.

Yet I think in most cases it is one of the lesser vices. Consider two men: John and Joe. John is a habitual and callous cheat with no pretensions to virtue and Joe is a religious family man who once betrayed his wife. I think most of us would agree that John’s behaviour is more condemnable — and that Joe’s worst sin was cheating and not hypocrisy. Joe might be more satisfying to condemn, because dragging the righteous from their perch has a thrill which denouncing the lowly does not, but that isn’t quite the same thing.

People on the Right love to talk about hypocrisy, in its undeniable and contentious forms. Check out any Right-wing website and you will find article after article about hypocrisy — and, more specifically, staggering hypocrisy. The “staggering hypocrisy” of the BBC. The “staggering hypocrisy” of Jean-Claude Juncker. The “staggering hypocrisy” of Labour.

But then I love to criticise hypocrisy as well. On the Right, our red meat is an environmentalist who takes a plane, or an advocate of socialism with a second home, or a male feminist who gets handsy after dark. Progressives idealists and scolds who cannot, or will not, live up to their own lofty ideals are entertaining archetypes, who make for good copy, but there are limits to this kind of rhetorical manoeuvre.

First, instances of “hypocrisy” can be nothing of the kind. For example, this year Dan Hodges of the Mail declared that Labour politicians “have to stop being a bunch of holier-than-though, self-serving hypocrites”. What makes them hypocrites? Hodges wrote: “Two years ago, Corbyn announced he was launching a campaign to oppose plans for a range of new grammar schools, roundly endorsed by his Shadow Cabinet. Corbyn attended Haberdashers’ Adams Grammar School in Shropshire. Sir Keir attended Reigate Grammar School in Surrey.”

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How is this hypocrisy? What are Corbyn and Starmer meant to do, go back in time and insist on their parents sending them to different schools? Left-wingers who rail against private schools while sending their own kids to them can be accused of hypocrisy, perhaps, but I don’t think we can hold Corbyn and Starmer’s education against them.

A classic example of misplaced hypocrisy-hunting came when Tory MP-cum-“Never Trump” fanatic Louise Mensch scoffed on Have I Got News for You about “Occupy” protestors who had iPhones and bought drinks at Starbucks, prompting Ian Hislop to ask whether one needs to advocate a return to the Stone Age to oppose state cuts. One must be careful that one’s charges of hypocrisy are not just hymns for the choir, intended to affirm Right-wing impressions of coddled progressives without illuminating the smallest substantive insight.

Another weakness with charges of hypocrisy is that using someone’s failure to uphold their standards as a means of discrediting those standards is a classic example of the ad hominem fallacy, or, in British English terms, playing the man and not the ball. I don’t want to be too much of a debate nerd. Such accusations can reveal some things about those standards — not least that they are hard to keep. But it does not prove that they are wrong to hold.

If Harry and Meghan use private jets while handwringing about climate change, for example, it might say something about Harry and Meghan but it says nothing about climate change. If Neil Ferguson meets his girlfriend while in lockdown it might say something about Neil Ferguson but it says nothing about epidemiology. If I tell people smoking is dangerous but indulge in a quiet cigarette behind closed doors, that does not mean tobacco is a health product.

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The ubiquity of these charges would be more understandable if they were effective. The biggest problem with Right-wing hypocrophobia, however, is that it acts as a cheap and toothless substitute for explicating and defending principles and policies. When Gary Lineker attacked people who oppose Britain accepting immigrants who illegally travel across the English Channel, for example, MP Lee Anderson called him a hypocrite for not accepting immigrants into his own home. Lineker then took the wind out his sails by inviting migrants to, yes, live in his home.

To be fair to Anderson, it is relatively easy for Lineker to say this when he has a mansion. Yet it is still lazy and weak to hunt for examples of personal inconsistency when he could have mentioned how accepting such immigrants encourages dangerous, illegal crossings, enables people smugglers, runs the risk of Britain accepting hostile actors, strains public resources and makes a farce out of British border control. Perhaps the latter would have made for a more strenuous and controversial argument but it would have been more honest and more effective — that is, to a conservative illegal immigration in itself is a bad thing, whatever the personal conduct of those advocating for it.

Right-wingers often argue, correctly, that Left-wingers use charges of personal bigotry as a means of avoiding difficult debates. Yet conservatives often do the same with the charges of personal inconsistency. The difference is that bigotry is a powerful charge, while inconsistency has fewer such damning connotations.

Again, this does not mean that charges of hypocrisy are worthless. For example, the enthusiasm with which many leftists greeted Black Lives Matter protests in the midst of lockdowns they had tended to ferociously support might not have proven anything about coronavirus but it was a powerful indictment of their priorities. Yet the Right should recognise their limits, since their opponents use charges of hypocrisy too. Long before the #metoo’d male feminist, the Christian moralist with a colourful sex life, for example, has been a classic archetype, as Jerry Falwell Jr. recently reminded us.

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Back-and-forth accusations of inconsistency have a lot to do with the decline of a shared moral language. In her book Ordinary Vices, Judith Shklar wrote: “This is the normal character of political discourse between irreconcilable ideological opponents… the contempt for hypocrisy is the only common ground that remains, and that is what renders these accusations so effective.”

Leftists, however, are far less reliant on accusations of hypocrisy, preferring charges of cruelty, prejudice and intolerance. This is because progressive values are more fashionable than conservative principles, so leftists have fewer qualms about articulating their own worldview.

This makes it more understandable that Right-wingers hope their opponents will hang themselves with their own cord. But it can also be tedious and ineffectual. It allows progressives to lead the conversation — with their values front and centre, even when they are being criticised — and reduces conservatives to the role of anklebiters. One should have enough pride in one’s own beliefs not to spend all of one’s time holding others to theirs. I mean, if your opponents lived with scrupulous consistency, would you have to admit that they were right all along?