There has been something undeniably bizarre and occasionally surreal about a football presenter who knocked the Prime Minister off the front pages.

And the trigger? A single tweet in which the presenter deplored the government’s plans to get tough on asylum seekers crossing the Channel into Kent.

It led to the spectacle of watching BBC News reporting what the BBC was saying about the BBC.

The BBC is often said to be a much-loved institution - a bit like the NHS - but even those organisations can be prone to misjudgements, sometimes catastrophically so.

The BBC, with impartiality running through its veins, decided to pick a fight with another much-loved institution in the form of Gary Lineker. It has been disastrous.

Taking on a football legend, whatever the rights and wrongs of his views, was always likely to end badly and so it has.

The BBC, tail between its legs, has beaten a clunking retreat and fessed up to getting it wrong when it effectively suspended him from hosting Match Of The Day.

Its palpable failures - excluding its decision - has been its lack of recognition of the public mood.

It should have known that this was an uneven contest and there was little to be done.

There is nevertheless an inadvertent consequence of this episode: there are more people engaging in the debate about impartiality than perhaps there would have been.

As to what the BBC comes up with in terms of guidance to its presenters, we shall see.

We live in a complicated world where the wheels sometimes come off at unexpected moments: finding a universal impartiality code that covers everything and everyone is probably impossible.

Is Graham Norton’s banter about politicians at the start of his chat show deemed to be over the top? What would have happened if a presenter had gone out of their way to praise the government’s asylum reforms?

No doubt some of these trickier issues will be pushed into the long grass, providing the broadcaster with more time.

THE row over Lineker was not good timing for PM Rishi Sunak, who would have hoped to have got some acclaim for striking a new spirit of entente with French President Emmanuel Macron.

His bromance with Macron saw the pair indulging in the kind of back-slapping and fist bumping that was guaranteed to put him on the front page of most national newspapers. At least it would have until the Lineker story broke.