In 1994, Walkers Crisps launched an advertising campaign in which Gary Lineker, the nice man of football, returned to his hometown of Leicester, received universal adoration and began stealing food from children. That’s how nice Gary Lineker is: for nearly 30 years, a major British snack brand has been playing on his reputation for niceness.
More than 150 crisp adverts later, though, being nice is out of fashion. Niceness, some think, should be a sackable offence. Yesterday on Twitter, Lineker described Suella Braverman’s latest attempts to shore up the government by kicking refugees as “beyond awful”. Later, when criticised, he replied: “This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s”.
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