If paying more is a basic British value Gary Lineker holds dear, what was he doing for the best part of a decade contesting a tax bill down to the last pound?
By any measure, Gary Lineker knows his way around a tax lawyer’s office. Between 2013 and 2018, HMRC pursued him for £4.9 million in income tax and National Insurance, arguing that the arrangement he used to channel his BBC and BT Sport earnings (a partnership company set up with his then-wife) was really just a way of avoiding the tax an ordinary employee would pay.
Lineker didn’t shrug and settle. He fought it. For years. All the way to a tax tribunal, where in 2023 a judge ultimately agreed with him: his contracts were genuinely freelance, IR35 didn’t apply, and he owed nothing extra.
He won fair and square, under the law as it stood. Nobody is disputing that. But it’s worth sitting with what “fighting fair and square” actually looked like here: years of tribunal proceedings, a legal team, and a determined effort to establish that he should pay less tax than HMRC believed he owed… not more.
Which makes today’s headline a little rich. Lineker is now one of 120 millionaires who’ve signed an open letter telling the Prime Minister: “We want you to tax us. We can afford it.” He says paying your fair share is “a basic British value” and that he’s “proud to stand with” people who want a more equal society.
But here’s the question nobody in that letter seems to want to answer: if paying more is a basic British value Gary Lineker holds dear, what was he doing for the best part of a decade contesting a tax bill down to the last pound?
HM Treasury doesn’t require an act of Parliament for Lineker to pay more. It takes a quick transfer. Voluntary donations to the Treasury are an established, publicly documented process: name, address, amount, seven days’ notice, and the money’s gone. No wealth tax required, no letter to the Prime Minister required, no waiting for Andy Burnham to “not rule things out.” Just a bank transfer.
The Patriotic Millionaires’ rebuttal, that individual donations don’t move the dial, and only a change in the law does. Fair enough: one man’s cheque doesn’t fund the NHS. But that argument explains why Lineker wants the law changed for everyone. It doesn’t explain why the same man who spent years and, by some estimates, a small fortune in legal fees establishing that he owed HMRC nothing beyond what the law strictly required, is now positioning himself as some kind of moral standard-bearer on the subject of paying your fair share.
You can believe the tax system should be more redistributive. You can also, apparently, be extremely committed to not paying a penny more than the system currently demands of you. Holding both positions at once isn’t illegal. It isn’t even inconsistent, technically — but it does rather undercut the “I’m proud to pay” branding.
Plus Gary and his friends seem to miss an important point. As a Conservative spokesperson quite rightly says: “If you keep raising taxes on top of everything else, you’ll just see more millionaires leaving the country. These are often the entrepreneurs and business owners who create wealth in the first place, and they do far more for Britain being taxed fairly here and reinvesting here than they would sitting on a spreadsheet in Monaco.
“Thousands of British millionaires have already left the country since Labour took office. Chase away more, and it’s the whole country that ends up worse off.”
But if Gary Lineker genuinely thinks he should be handing over more of his own estimated £30 million fortune, the Treasury’s account details are one search away. In fact here you go, Gary: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/voluntary-payments-donations-to-government
Everything else is a press release.
