Gary seems to have had quite the damascene conversion in the past few months, he’s an open critic of Brexit and has had a go at trolling Donald Trump

No. Scratch that, he’s becoming obsessive about Trump, and hardly a day goes by without a mention of how awful / evil he is.

Gary has now taken to the streets and is marching in solidarity with something or other along with other great thinkers like Lily Allen.

What’s caused this amazing change in his outlook? In my cynical little mind, there’s only two possible reasons that a man with a reputed £31m fortune and a TV career can have for this.

Cherchez la Femme and Follow the Money.

Let’s start with Cherchez la Femme

The expression comes from the 1854 novel “The Mohicans of Paris” by Alexandre Dumas.

Cherchez la femme, pardieu ! Cherchez la femme !

Meaning; whatever the problem may be, a woman is the cause, A new girlfriend, an angry ex, a mistress – whatever.

Gary seems quite open in his private life these days and a quick trawl through the horrors of the tabloid internet doesn’t show any new relationships, so unless he has a new, very young, politically active girlfriend, this doesn’t seem to be the reason.

Maybe we should try Follow the Money.

In the immortal words of Lester Freamon from The Wire, “You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you don’t know where the fuck it’s gonna take you”.

Before we do though, here’s a short list of the things that Gary has spoken out about recently:

• Immigration- the ‘Children’ who came through Calais.
• Brexit
• Trump
• Nigel Farage
• Press Regulation – he hates the Sun

Quite the list really, marking him out as a truly modern, left-leaning, liberal sort of multimillionaire.

Curiously, Gary has stayed clear of only one major story in the past few months – and I’d actually be happy to see him come out in support of the victims.

The story gets bigger week by week and very few footballers have made any comment at all, but Wayne Rooney was vocal from the first few days. 

The Metropolitan Police force released a statement revealing that 255 cases of abuse in London (just London) teams have been reported, relating to individuals at 77 clubs.

The sex abuse claims include all five Premier League teams as well as three Championship teams, three League One and Two teams and 66 other named clubs.

The force refused to disclose the names of the clubs involved or the nature of the allegations against each club.

But the city’s top teams believed to be involved are Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham, West Ham and Crystal Palace.

A massive story in fact – With Gary having played for two of the clubs now named.

Still maybe his silence is just him being sensitive and thoughtful, because he’s not the type to mindlessly opine about something on Twitter is he?

Or perhaps he’s helping the police by quietly pointing out the people that he suspected when he was a player. That would be nice too.

In the meantime, he continues to pontificate on international politics and appears to be regressing back to the student activist that he never was.

He recently hosted ‘Have I Got News for You’ and managed to annoy a percentage of the population who still watch the BBC with a joke about Brexit voters being dead in 10 years, and maybe, just maybe, this is where the new persona is taking him.

Lineker is a freelancer to the BBC, although his work is almost exclusively for them these days, so it’s likely a tax arrangement which also enables him to sell crisps, rather than a desire to stay independent.

He’s building a media profile up with Twitter, interviews in the foreign press

and marching on the streets to protest things that will never affect him.

Can a new chat-show with a political slant and early guests such as Charlotte Church and Lily Allen be far behind?