Damian Reilly

For an astonishing length of time the attitude of football authorities to the prospect of widespread doping at the sport's highest levels seemed best summed up in a 2017 tweet by the often spectacularly dim-seeming Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker. ‘Doping is not really an issue in football. Doping doesn't help players play better. No amount of drugs will help you pass, dribble [or] shoot,’ he said – a statement that will presumably now come as a considerable shock to Juventus, France, and former Manchester United  midfielder Paul Pogba, who has just been handed a four year ban after being popped for use of synthetic testosterone.

In the mid-90s when I was a 19-year-old undergraduate I did work experience at the now defunct The Face magazine. They put me in what they called the fashion cupboard. Looking back on it now, I recall I spent a hot fortnight in August either hoiking large volumes of clothing around London for various photoshoots or listening, usually at close quarters, to homosexual men – fashionistas, darling – discussing their sex lives in great detail over the telephone. I wasn’t terribly worldly and I found the whole thing fascinating. Far more sophisticated than me was the other work experience boy, Lance, a skinny 17-year-old who was, as they say, as gay as Christmas.

Just when you thought you couldn’t handle any more depressing news, Gary Lineker has started dropping hints that his days in the Match of the Day presenter’s chair may be drawing to an end. I know. It really puts things into perspective. ‘I’m ancient,’ Lineker said, Aslan-like, on the latest Match of the Day podcast, ‘my time is nearly up.’ The most powerful man at the BBC – and football’s most famous Gary – then seemed to anoint his successor by giving the nod to the endlessly anodyne former Tottenham and Newcastle midfielder Jermaine Jenas. ‘He’s probably drifting toward my role,’ Lineker told presumably astonished co-hosts Alan Shearer and Micah Richards. ‘He’s doing it really well, doing The One Show.

It’s perhaps still too early to tell if the Jewish and Muslim communities, here in Britain and indeed throughout the world, were brought closer by the actions of the former Yorkshire cricketer Azeem Rafiq.   How refreshing it is to see the quaint concept of proof being demanded before a man’s life is ruined Rafiq, you will remember, in November 2021 went to hear in person from Holocaust survivor Ruth Barnett, 86, about her experience of being on the receiving end in Nazi Germany of what you'd probably have to say was on balance worse than anything you could possibly experience in or around a cricket ground.

The high-profile political activist Gary Lineker will not present Match of the Day tonight after he likened the rhetoric of the government to 1930s Germany. Several pundits and commentators are boycotting the show, while the BBC has also been forced to pull from air Football Focus, Final Score and Fighting Talk.  Many people are professing themselves baffled that this story about a football presenter and Twitter should dominate the news agenda for several days. But the real story here is about what is often referred to as the culture war and who is winning it.   We are finding out who's really in charge of the BBC. Is it we, the people who pay the licence fee on threat of imprisonment, and who are told the service is impartial when it is not?

‘It’s like that whole #MeToo thing,’ says Esmond Baring, 44, scion of the famous banking family and founder of The Privileged Man, a support group for, er, privileged men. ‘Once you’ve realised you’re not alone, you can ask for help.’ Baring is rakishly handsome and talks with the zeal and articulacy of the true convert. He met co-founder Pete Hunt, 40, in 2011 on the island of Bali after he’d experienced a fairly vigorous nervous breakdown. Ten years later, both having left the corporate world to which they felt ill-suited, they established The Privileged Man.