Co-conspirators may remember back to last September when the new BBC director-general Tim Davie appeared before Julian Knight’s select committee, promising to finally deal with the scourge of taxpayer-funded stars using their personal social media profiles to break the BBC’s supposed political neutrality. Knight proffered a specific example of a Gary Lineker anti-government tweet, in response to which Davie promised new powers that would allow the corporation to take stars like Lineker “off Twitter”. At the time he stuck to his word of publishing new social media guidelines in the coming weeks.

Since then, Mr Davie has clearly abandoned the promise, with just two staffers disciplined for social media breaches in the last year. Every other tweet of Gary Lineker’s remains overtly political; from migration to climate change, attacking Sajid Javid to calling the PM a “liar”.

There is no sign at all of the BBC preventing his Twitter rule-breaking, let alone taking him off the platform. If stars know they’re so important the rules don’t apply, the BBC’s unenforced social media guidelines become a sham…