Hallo Readers,

As a player, Gary Lineker was famous for a number of things, including never getting booked during his whole career.  WTF suspects that he never scored an own goal either, which is more than you can say for the waste-basket of Deplorables who lined up last week to kick him for (i) stating  an opinion they disagreed with and (ii) being a woke lefty. One suspects that this lot also do not like the fact that Lineker earns £1.3m for presenting football on the BBC.  If anyone should be rich, it should be bankers and businessmen and MPs and (right-wing) journalists, not chaps who used to kick a football a quarter of a century back.  In any event, anxious to distract the country from the horror of Cruela de Braverman’s plan to expel foreigners (who were all thieves and rapists invading the country) and to ship them as far away as possible at the greatest possible expense, the Deplorables seized upon a tweet from Lineker which said it was ‘an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s’. How they howled for his immediate dismissal! The BBC is publicly funded and should be impartial! He had called Braverman a Nazi! (He hadn’t). At first the D-G of the BBC, Tim Davie, took no action, at which point the Deplorables foamed at the mouth even more and last Friday Lineker was suspended. At which point, both pundits on Match of the Day said they would not appear, the usual replacements said they would not appear either, even those who had never been asked to do so, and the commentators pulled out. The BBC could only broadcast 20 minutes of footage without commentary or punditry, at which point blind people took to the radio phone-ins loudly complaining that they had been abandoned and why had no one thought of them? Letting down the footie-mad public is one thing, but once you start ignoring the needs of blind viewers, you are fucked. Sunday night went the same way with only 10 minutes of silent highlights and by Monday, Lineker was restored to the Nation with the BBC and the Deplorables covered in ordure and looking very silly.

It is hard to nominate the worst contribution to this fiasco. There was the BBC bowing to the mob complaining about the need for BBC impartiality, although the mob was quite happy with the BBC Chair having helped Boris Johnson, the PM who appointed him, to secure a guarantor, a long lost cousin of Johnson’s, apparently, for a £800K loan  – the same chair who had contributed £400K to the Tory Party. After all, nothing says impartiality like a £400K cheque. And the mob did not mind other BBC presenters publicly tweeting support for the Tories, like Lord Alan Sugar and more-right-wing-than-Genghis-Khan Andrew Neil. There was also the appalling Jonathan Gullis MP alleging – wholly falsely – that Lineker had called his constituents ‘racists’ and the people who had lost relatives in Nazi concentration camps alleging that Lineker had cheapened the Holocaust (he hadn’t because he didn’t refer to it). But the winner is Sir John Hayes MP who appeared on every channel simultaneously over the weekend demanding that Lineker must go and suggesting that as a mere footballer, he had no right to pronounce on matters he did not understand. He then ensured his place on the podium in the Commons on Tuesday by calling Lineker  a ‘self-indulgent, out of touch, insensitive, avaricious, smug, and arrogant football pundit’. As Regan remarked of King Lear, ‘he did ever but slenderly know himself’. 

Deplorables all – you took one hell of a beating. You look like fools and that is because you are.  Lineker is not a news broadcaster and he should be entitled to voice his opinions, even ones you do not like. He stuck to those views and he stuck it to the lynch mob baying for his blood. As for the BBC, sort your Chairman out first, not to mention the Board member who worked for Theresa May. Draw up a clear social media policy and apply it fairly to everyone. Stop kow-towing to the Tories. Do your bloody job and let Lineker do his. 

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Our review of the week’s crappy clothing is all about the Oscars, either on the White Carpet or at the Vanity Fair Afterparty. We start with actor Florence Pugh, who is becoming something of a regular in these pages, wearing Valentino.

From the neck up, everything is good. From the neck down, it is perfectly ridiculous, like a kiddie from a chorus peeping out from behind ornate theatre curtains. Meanwhile WTF is tired of having to point this out, but satin creases horribly and should never be worn unless there is someone from the atelier following behind with a hand-held steamer.

Next up we have actor Danielle Brooks wearing Nina Ricci. Brace yourselves… 

The good news is that no actual animal died in the making of this affront to the eyeballs as it is faux-fur. The bad news is that the faux-fur affront to the eyeballs is unfastened, exposing appalled onlookers to a great deal of Danielle in a sparkly bodysuit which is wrinkling around her knees like Nora Batty from Last of the Summer Wine. And Nora would have had no truck with that turd topknot.

Here is actor Harvey Guillén wearing Christian Siriano.

This is actually rather fabulous in its own weird way, but the whole thing puts WTF in mind of  the opera singer bloke in the Go Compare ads.

This is actor and director Olivia Wilde wearing Gabriela Hearst.

The alleged dress is a trifle snug around the hips but that is the least of it. Regular Readers will know that WTF hates a one-armed garment on a two-armed person almost above all things, but Olivia has gone one worse and has got rid of the whole right side of the garment in order to expose tit goggles like the ones you wear on your eyes when using a sun bed.

Along comes actor Eva Longoria wearing Zuhair Murad.

This is more boo-hoo than boho, like those lacy things you drape over cheap chairs at weddings. It is designed for someone about a foot taller, and features both a giant tit window and a This-Way-To-My-Minge arrow.

Now we have actor Riz Ahmed wearing Prada.

The trousers are tragic and if you are going to wear a shirt, button it at least a little bit. Or ditch it. But not both. The collar looks like a giraffe’s tongue showing pink tonsils.  

And now two women not wearing anything much at all in ‘dresses’ by Dundas. First we have model Alessandra Ambrosio.

Sigh. And then singer Ciara wearing even less.

At least Alessandra’s has some nice embroidery, and while WTF does not like thongs under sheer, at least hers is better than whatever Ciara has got under her fishing net, which looks like a jockstrap. And of course, there are the mandatory arse cheeks…

Next up, we have muscled actor Lucien Laviscount wearing Gucci.

This is a random collection of nonsense, more tragic trewsies, a ruff like a choir boy, bovver boots, opera gloves and, most puzzlingly, a giant hernia belt.

Finally, here comes actor Hunter Schafer  wearing Ludovic De Saint Sernin for Ann Duelemeester. Careful now….

It takes longer to name the designer than it does to look at his creation, which is basically an under-slip and a very small upturned sanitary pad. Yurgle.

OK Readers, that’s your lot for this week.  Please keep sending in your suggestions for It’s Got To Go (no room this week, sorry!) and your top comments, which WTF likes more than anything. Let us meet again next Friday. Be good.