"Who could have predicted that the government's asylum policies and the language around them, so robustly criticised by Gary Lineker in his tweets, would end up reducing the BBC's most popular football show to this?"

lol, robust my arse, it was a mild rebuke/ critique. All the meltdowns have come from the top down at the insistence, that rose tinted glasses don't get knocked off. To add to the hilarious optics of this. it's precisely because Linekar is a high profile celebrity talking to a captive audience of what is often a reactionary fanbase, that the Beeb is pushing harder to curtail the message, which of course magnifies it like the Streisand effect.