Gary Lineker will be a tough act to follow

I'm going to miss Gary Lineker on Match Of The Day. Whoever ends up replacing him will have a hard act to follow. He's easily the best football presenter on TV, knowledgeable, funny, and with a gift for talking "through" the camera directly to his audience. Lineker doesn't present; he holds conversations with the viewers. Not many TV hosts can do that with such practised ease.

This week has seen swirling, incoherent accounts of exactly why he's leaving the programme after 25 years at the helm. Was it his decision to quit the pitch, as "Team Lineker" have claimed? Or was this a classic dispatch by ruthless BBC apparatchiks, fed up with having to manage the so-called "Lineker problem"?

Lineker, of course, made fools of his employers when they took him off air for comparing then Home Secretary Suella Braverman's comments on the Tory government's ill-fated Rwanda scheme with "language not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 1930s." Hmm.

Comparisons with the Nazi regime, even indirect ones, rarely end well. Best avoided, even if Lineker's underlying argument struck a chord with many.

Under fierce government pressure, the BBC said its star would "step back" from that weekend's Match Of The Day. So in a classic "I'm Spartacus" moment, his fellow presenters announced that if Lineker wasn't there, they wouldn't be appearing either. Collapse of stout party. Lineker was back on air the following week.

Of course, BBC presenters aren't supposed to show political bias. But Lineker wasn't hosting Newsnight, or Question Time. He was talking exclusively about football. And, emboldened, he continued to stand his ground and tweet more or less what he liked, within reason. Even though I didn't always agree with everything he said, I really couldn't see the harm.

But if there's one thing I've learned after 46 years working in television, it's where the true power lies. And believe me, despite appearances, it's not with the presenter in studio. It's with the boss in the office upstairs. Always. Every time. That "tweetgate" victory was deceptive. A baulked boss almost always lives to fight another day. So when rumours begin to circulate in recent weeks that Lineker's days on Match Of The Day were numbered, I wasn't surprised.

Maybe he jumped before he was pushed; maybe he would have left anyway (he has a lucrative career in his hugely successful podcasts). But there have been well-placed reports that the BBC's new Director of Sport, Alex Kay-Jelski, had Lineker in his sights from the day he took over back in April.

One of the quickest ways for a TV boss to establish their authority is to ditch a big on-screen name pour encourager les autres. I've seen it happen time and time again.

As I say, Lineker may have decided he wanted off the programme anyway, especially if he thought his new boss was on manoeuvres against him. If so, good for Gary. Get your retaliation in first.

I certainly make this prediction. Without Lineker, Match Of The Day's viewing figures will fall away. Who'll be on the winning team then?

One in five cars that hit a pothole are so badly damaged they have to be written off. So you've got a 20 per cent chance of kissing your car goodbye for ever if you drive into one.

The write-offs rarely have anything to do with speeding.

A £36,000 Audi recently hit a deep pothole at 15mph. It was classed as a "total loss".

How has this happened? How has the UK ended up with an estimated 11.5 million potholes? Our highways were probably in better nick back in Dick Turpin's day.

Eye-popping pictures of Abbey Clancy, er, snookering husband Peter Crouch on a big billiards table. Maybe she just wanted to find how many balls are in his pockets!

I simply cannot fathom opposition to the anti-smoking pills about to be rolled out on the NHS. The pill kills the desire for nicotine, be it from cigarettes or vapes. This amazing drug is called varenicline. It's cheap, and it works. So what's the problem? Good old-fashioned British puritanism, that's what. Opinion polls this week showed a lofty minority believe that smokers should rely on willpower alone to kick their lethal habit. This is both judgmental and ridiculous. People desperate to stop smoking strain every sinew to do so, yet still they fail. Nicotine addiction is pernicious.

Cigarettes killed my father at 49 (I was 21 when he died). Yet still I continued to smoke, despite numerous attempts to give up. I finally managed to stop aged 40, after interviewing John Diamond, Nigella Lawson's first husband, who was dying (horribly) from smoking-induced throat cancer. I was so shaken by the encounter I never touched a cigarette again. Even so, I've been left with a permanently impaired respiratory system and my cancer risk will never return completely to normal. If you'd offered me varenicline when I was 21, I would have bitten your arm off.