Gary Neville’s detractors are pathetic

“I’ve been building in this city for the past 15 to 20 years and no one’s put a union jack up in that time,” he said. “So why do they need to put one up now?” 

Neville went on: “Because, quite clearly, it’s sending the message to everybody that there is something that you don’t like. [The] union jack flag being used in a negative fashion is not right.” He blamed the foment on “angry middle-age white men who know exactly what they’re doing”. 

Pundits from the manic right reacted like a battalion of drunken Boca Junior supporters after a last-minute defeat to River Plate.  Speaking on Talk Sport, mid-morning co-host Simon Jordan, the former Crystal Palace owner, said, “He’s a champagne socialist and a coward. I think it’s a dreadful thing to have said… He lives in a very rarified world where his money and privilege has allowed him to live behind a gated environment.” 

Regardless of whether these circumstances are real or imagined, the question, the question of how Neville’s domestic arrangements differ from Jordan’s own is worth considering. As a multimillionaire, it’s difficult to picture the permatanned Jordan and his partner, the GB News anchor Michelle Dewberry, setting up home on the terraced streets surrounding Selhurst Park. By that logic, he is as disconnected from ‘reality’ as Neville.

Inevitably, GB News itself was all over the story. Lumping the ball straight into the mixer, pundit Carole Malone wrote that “the only people [the flag] might upset are people who hate our country, our culture and want both destroyed”. As anyone who’s witnessed Malone’s more-than-passable impression of the world’s most irritating person can attest, her own factory settings have never knowingly dipped below screaming outrage. To put it quietly, commenting on the blood pressure of others is a bit rich.

With no evidence whatsoever, fellow right wing mouth-foamer Kelvin Mackenzie claimed that the people rallying round the flag are in fact Jewish. In a piece for – pull up a chair – GB News that reads as if it was written atop a mechanical bull, the former tabloid fuhrer claimed that Neville “can walk down the road without the fear of physical attack. That is currently not the position of the Jewish community.”

To be fair, here, Mackenzie might well know of what he speaks. Thirty-six years after lying about Liverpool supporters at Hillsborough, I can think of at least one part of the country where his presence would not be welcome. 

Over at Mackenzie’s former stomping ground The Sun, meanwhile, meanwhile, Stephen Pollard’s claim that the union flag “is no threat to me or to anyone who is proud to be British” at least found the pulse of the matter. Never mind that for some people patriotism is a members-only club – one thinks of former academic Matt Goodwin’s recent claim that only white folk can be English, for example – according to this telling, Britishness itself is contingent on gratitude and national amour propre.

As if this weren’t quite enough, the terms and conditions have been drawn up by people who seem genuinely to dislike the place. At the very least, they can’t stop moaning about it. 

One overlooked aspect of the story is that “the angry middle-age white men” to whom Gary Neville referred surely include Nigel Farage, Richard Tice and Robert Jenrick. These are the people “who know exactly what they’re doing”. With the deftness of card sharks, they’ve managed to distil centuries of history into a children’s story. Never mind the baddies, just look at the sun that never set on our glorious empire. 

Mercifully, resisting this kind of infantilism doesn’t require an equal and opposite reaction. I’m not here to be a booster for Gary Neville. I don’t have to pretend, for example, that he wasn’t torn to shreds, by Ian Hislop on Have I Got News For You, for accepting a role as a commentator on Qatari state television at the last World Cup. I’m also free to say that in neglecting to mention the atrocity at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue, last Thursday, his video lacked care. 

This, though, is beside the point. No matter how gracefully he wandered onto the pitch, Gary Neville was due a beating the minute he dared to disagree with the furious right – the same kind of people who claim to love free speech.

“How strange that Neville should disdain [the people who raise flags] – the type who work on his building sites, who seek an escape from the daily grind by paying the Sky Sports subscriptions that support his seven-figure salary – as some unspeakable sub-group of society,” screamed the sportswriter Oliver Brown. 

Gratuitous references to Neville’s salary? Describing ordinary lives as a “grind”? Well this is more like it… our story is about class. It’s about who in the public eye has the right to proffer an opinion. Unlike another former athlete, the smoothly spoken Matthew Syed, who escaped comment from the swivel-eyed outrage community despite making his own public address at this week’s Conservative Party conference, people named Gary dine below the salt. 

Despite the enthusiasm of his detractors, Gary Neville can perhaps take comfort in knowing that he’s heard worse. Back in the days when he and his brother Philip wore three lions on their shirt, supporters of sides playing
United would sing “if the Nevilles can play for England so can I”. Now that’s a brickbat.

By comparison, the predictable and hysterical mewling of a right wing media choir should be small beer indeed.