Look who's back! Gary Lineker arrives at Match Of The Day offices

Look who’s back! Gary Lineker arrives at Match Of The Day offices as he prepares to front Saturday night football show for first time since Nazi tweet row

• The Match Of The Day pundit is back in the presenters’ chair this evening 
• It will be his first MOTD since the program was aired without commentary  
• Read more: Gary Lineker insists migrant tweet was ‘factually accurate’ 

Gary Lineker has arrived at the BBC studios to film his first Match Of The Day since the BBC took him off air for incendiary tweets. 

The former England footballer and pundit, 62, was taken off air over a tweet that appeared to compare the government to Nazis over their immigration policy. 

A swathe of fellow presenters and commentators refused to step into his shoes, forcing the BBC to air the traditional football round-up without any commentary. 

Last weekend Suella Braverman’s husband spoke out in the Daily Mail about Lineker’s tweet, saying that he found the comments offensive as a Jew who lost relatives in the Holocaust.  

Lineker’s return to Saturday night television comes days after he claimed in an interview with Men’s Health that BBC bosses admitted that they had ‘got it wrong’.   

Gary Lineker arrives at the Salford Match Of The Day studios for the first time since he was suspended over a tweet comparing the government to Nazis 

A swathe of fellow presenters and commentators refused to step into his shoes, forcing the BBC to air the traditional football round-up without any commentary

Gary Lineker was speaking to Men’s Health UK ‘Talking Heads’ columnist, Alastair Campbell, in an interview available on the magazine’s website now

The interview, published in Men’s Health magazine, risks enveloping the BBC in a fresh row over how they supposedly ‘backed down’.

‘I have three rules,’ he told Alastair Campbell, a former government communications director. 

‘I never tweet if I’ve been drinking, I never tweet if I’m angry, and I always read the tweet back before hitting send.

‘If I have 1% of doubt, I don’t post it.’

He said: ‘When I sent that tweet, it honestly never even crossed my mind that it would lead to where it went. I’ve worked with refugees’ charities for years. So, when I saw the Suella Braverman film, I said I thought it was pretty awful.

‘Then the ‘stick to football’ people weighed in and I replied to one of them, just saying there was no massive influx, the UK takes far fewer refugees than other European countries, this is a cruel policy, and the language used in the debate reminds us of the debate in Germany in the 1930s.

‘I think that is factually accurate.’

The corporation’s highest-paid star, who earns £1.35million a year, had described Suella Braverman’s Illegal Migration Bill as ‘immeasurably cruel’. 

Lineker also said after he was first suspended over his tweets, that he found it ‘hard to see how it got resolved unless they backed down’. 

He had insisted his status as a sports presenter employed by the BBC on a freelance basis meant he did not have to abide by the same impartiality rules as other staff. 

The pundit also believed he had a ‘special agreement’ with BBC director general Tim Davie to tweet about migrants and immigration, his agent Jon Holmes claimed. 

Reflecting on Davie’s decision to reinstate him after fellow pundits boycotted Match Of The Day, Lineker told Campbell: ‘To be fair to Tim Davie, he admitted they had got it wrong and sorted it out.’

BBC director-general Tim Davie, pictured here in an interview with Nomia Iqbal, has denied he will resign over the row

Match of the Day was at one point cut to just 20 minutes in length as presenters, staff and commentators refused to come to work in support for Lineker

Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson blasted the former footballer for his ‘woke nonsense’. ‘The only thing Tim Davie has got wrong in this instance is keeping Lineker in a job at the BBC,’ he told the Mail. 

Last month, Davie apologised to viewers and MOTD staff for the impact the episode had on scheduled programming.

When asked whether he would resign over the chaos, Davie apologised for disruption but refused to step down.

Lineker previously spoke about the issue on Campbell’s podcast with former Tory MP Rory Stewart, The Rest Is Politics: Leading, which is produced by Lineker’s own Goalhanger Podcasts company. 

Gary Lineker has insisted he was being ‘factually accurate’ when he compared the language in the Government’s ‘cruel’ asylum policy to that used in 1930s Germany

Last week, speaking on the Match of the Day: Top 10 podcast episodew ith BBC colleagues Alan Shearer and Micah Richards, Lineker joked ‘my time is nearly up’ on the flagship football show.

In the episode, which saw the presenters rate the best football pundits, Lineker said: ‘Obviously there are a lot of pundits who didn’t make the list we were given.

‘The likes of Andy Gray, Danny Murphy who is a brilliant analyst, Jermaine Jenas – who is probably drifting more towards my role. I think Jermaine is doing it really well as well, doing The One Show.’

When Richards asked if he was ‘nervous’ about losing his role, Lineker replied: ‘Nervous? I’m ancient. My time is nearly up.’

The BBC’s current package is understood to be worth £211.5million – covering three seasons until 2024-25. 

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