Andy Murray and the unstoppable rise of the sporting bores

When I was a girl, sportsmen were amiable dolts. If they were old-school, they liked blokes and beer; if switched-on, they liked boogieing with blondes at Tramp and dreamt of opening boutiques. But with both, you could rely on them never to let you know what they were thinking about the three-day week or the situation in Cyprus. 

When Andy Murray declared his support for Just Stop Oil this week, he joined that ever-burgeoning brigade of what I think of as the Schlock Jocks, or perhaps the Poppycock Jocks. Their leader is Saint Gary Lineker, the most expensive dominatrix around, taking the pound of the people and in return scolding the people who pay him. Gary, patron saint of refugees, whose virtue is so magical and identification with the under-privileged so great that he once spoke about receiving racist abuse, despite being born in Leicester to Margaret and Barry. Like all plonkers, Lineker has claimed that the language used about stopping economic migration to this country is in some way equivalent to ‘Germany in the 30s’ and is also a veteran Israel-basher, tweeting about arrests in the West Bank and lamenting the killing of a Palestinian man who was later revealed to be a member of Hamas, those lovely people responsible for multiple deadly bombings in Israel.

Then there’s Saint Lewis Hamilton, who memorably twittered in 2020: ‘I had time to reflect on where we are in the world today, every day I see something upsetting happening, people being abused, people suffering, volcanoes erupting, explosions, oceans and forest’s [sic] being destroyed. 2020 is such a heavy year. But it gives me hope seeing people come together, fighting for justice and doing more for our planet and the people in it.’ 

And of course Saint Gareth Southgate, who led a veritable squad of saints to Qatar last year; there’s nothing like the sight of men earning £100,000 a week for doing the thing they love lecturing us about colonialism to remind us of our privilege. In contrast, the brave men of the Iranian football team refused to sing their national anthem in solidarity with the protesters at home. It’s ironic that men raised in Iran care more about women’s rights than footballers raised in the liberal West, most of whom probably believe that ‘feminism’ is a brand of tampon and who can’t seem to go a week without giving us yet anther sexual-assault or domestic-violence headline.  

Gandhi Lineker trotted off happily to Qatar with ‘socialist’ Gary Neville plodding after him and – in the manner of a particularly thick pantomime horse – was Southgate himself, making a questionable claim about how keen the wretched migrant workers were to see the World Cup come to Qatar. The cherry on the top of this sumptuous sundae of hypocrisy were the players who planned to flaunt their support for LGBT by wearing ‘OneLove’ rainbow armbands – but who swiftly removed them when threatened with yellow cards. 

And now Andy Murray is the latest ball-botherer to tell us his thoughts on something completely unconnected with what he’s good at. Like the other Shlock Jocks, one gets the impression that Murray thinks talking about politics is just about the bravest thing in the world, while holding exactly the same anodyne, fashionable, corporation-endorsed, non-bank-cancelling opinions as the rest of his kind. After a Just Stop Oil nutter said it would ‘very inspiring’ for JSO to create ‘an image of someone’s hand glued to something on Centre Court…there’s a lot of people up for that’ Murray commented: ‘I would imagine probably something would happen here. I mean, I agree with the cause – just not always how they go about expressing it. Rather than running on the court, maybe they could do it a different way.’ 

Tell us, oh oracle! While you’re at it, perhaps clarify – as you ‘agree with the cause’ these Malthusian muppets propagate – how many planes you take a year, why you have four children under the age of seven and how you can support Scottish independence while being against oil? But of course, Andy’s habits – from flying to breeding – will be essential, and nobody else’s business; it’s us plebs who need to stay at home and worry about over-population. 

Being such a liberal conformist, it’s predictable that Murray simpers of Jonny Bairstow’s hands-on attitude to climate protestors ‘I didn’t see what Jonny Bairstow did, but it could be dangerous.’ Organisers at Wimbledon have, pathetically, told players and staff not to take matters into their own hands if protesters get onto the court. But how refreshing it was to see Bairstow carrying away a JSO toff as though he was a useless surfboard being stashed away for winter. 

Sportsmen are singularly ill-suited to pontificating about politics because sport is as cut-throat and greedy an industry as entertainment; it’s a cross between mediocre showbiz and bad religion. When we’re young, we all make a decision about how we’d prefer to make a living. Unequal opportunity will hinder us; in my own case, I had to overcome the fact that more than half this nation’s journalists were educated in private schools. Of those who went to state schools and still succeeded, most went to university. The percentage of working-class women who left education as teenagers and still succeeded in journalism is so low it’s unrecordable – basically, myself and Caitlin Moran (and she had too many books in her house as a kiddy for my liking). It’s getting worse – last year’s Diversity In Journalism report found that ‘Working class representation in UK journalism hits record low’ as the Press Gazette headline put it. 

Taking this into consideration, we still have a choice whether we want to do socially useful jobs, which often pay badly, or socially useless jobs, which often pay well. Actors, musicians and sportsmen all had the chance to become carers, teachers, firefighters – instead they chose to indulge their passion and keep their eyes on the prize rather than work selflessly for the social good. We respond to nurses strikes viscerally, even if logically we believe they are wrong, because we acknowledge they have chosen to do work which we wouldn’t have the patience for. During lockdown, our appreciation of refuse-collectors and shelf-stackers rightly rocketed. But this good sense seems to have fallen by the wayside and we again accept it as perfectly normal that we pay the least useful members of society – such as Gary Lineker and his band of brothers – the most money. 

These Empathletes are not only paid for what they do but haul in huge amounts from advertising; Lineker in particular has pocketed millions of pounds over the past 25 years urging the nation to neck as many units of salt, fat and sugar that we can manage to consume in the shape of Walkers crisps.  

If in the future those who have grown filthy rich from sport could only put their money where their mouths are, the air-polluting, hot-air carbon dioxide levels which worry the likes of Andy Murray so much would surely fall.