For Gary Lineker, a broadcast career that should have culminated in the supreme cachet of a World Cup final reaches its full stop with, of all things, a rat emoji.

If a week is a long time in politics, it is an aeon in the confounding life of Britain’s highest-profile television presenter, a man who dared consider himself bulletproof, but who has been brought down in a few torrid days by hubris.

Gary Lineker’s long and tumultuous broadcasting career is over.Credit: AP

Across 26 years fronting the BBC’s football coverage, he carved a niche as master of the autocue, always producing some knowingly creaky pun to describe England’s self-sabotage at major tournaments.

In the end, though, the one exit he failed to script was his own.

His mistake was in believing that he could survive any scandal, weather any storm, in the apparent certainty that his BBC employers needed him more than he needed them.

But the moment Lineker shared that fateful Instagram post last week about the Israel-Hamas war, with the symbol of a rat denoting one of the oldest antisemitic tropes in the book, the balance of power shifted. This time, there was no parade of celebrity pundits offering solidarity, no selfie against an inscription on the Broadcasting House wall of George Orwell’s message that “if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Finally, the BBC, weary of their superstar straying into areas far beyond his brief, decided they had heard enough.

It is staggering, even by the standards of a Lineker news cycle, how quickly it has come to this. When I interviewed him in London just 10 days ago, he was still dreaming of signing off with an England triumph in next year’s FIFA World Cup final in New Jersey. Asked if he might launch a diatribe against US President Donald Trump, in the same vein as his 2022, monologue decrying Qatar’s human rights abuses, he smiled: “Yes – if they let me in.”

Gary Lineker celebrates after his former team Leicester City scored in 2023.Credit: Getty Images

He grumbled that budgetary constraints might mean the BBC would only dispatch him to the United States for the knockout stages. Now they will not be sending him at all, instead directing him to the door without any of the star-spangled fanfare he had........

© The Age