Gary Neville’s a working class lad with opinions – no wonder he’s a hate figure ...Middle East

Poor Gary Neville, had he gone quietly into millionaire retirement, settled on the Gulf Riviera with sundry other Premier League exiles, taken up golf, life coaching or charitable concerns, he might have been serenaded at the Qatar Grand Prix like his old pal Sir David Beckham.

But no, he’s a gobby working class boy with a few quid and a point of view, and nothing gets up the noses of the lads like one of their own leaving them behind.

There are plenty of shots to be taken at Neville, not least for his joyless Manchester United commentary, which echoes the featureless, no frills way he played the game, made worse by his flat east Lancashire delivery, which in his case sucks the life out of the English language. 

He was rightly lampooned for accepting the Qatari dollar at beIN Sports during the World Cup having taken a moral axe to the Qatari regime over the award of the tournament – but to drill Neville for attending the Qatar Grand Prix as a guest of Mercedes is a dart fired at the wrong target.

This was the fifth running of the Qatar GP. The Lusail circuit adjacent to the stadium that hosted arguably the finest World Cup final since Brazil 1970, has been hosting international motorsport events since 2008. Formula One has been in the region 21 years since the inaugural Bahrain Grand Prix in 2004. Qatar’s addition to the rota took the total of grands prix in the region to four.

"Fascinating to see everybody at work."Gary Neville on the grid ahead of the Sprint Race pic.twitter.com/eaHadH9wKd

For those who hadn’t noticed, Qatar has become a central player in international diplomacy owing to its political and military allegiance to the USA, the UK’s avowed best friend. We are long past looking the other way regarding Gulf nations with appalling human rights records. Under the global leadership of the USA, no pariah is beyond an invite to the Oval Office and a chummy, fireside chat with the president.

To hold Neville to account for ethical infractions when the event he is attending has been blessed by the great powers, washed clean by every major sporting body on earth, and sanctioned by every one of us who engages with the spectacle, is the virtue signalling of the hard of seeing.

Neville’s real offence in the eyes of his critics is to turn on his own, that demographic of middle-aged white folk with a particular view of Britishness, a deep attachment to sovereignty and an immutable idea of identity from which he emerged.

Neville stood on the shoulders of Sir Thomas More, that redoubtable 16th century influencer, when highlighting the intolerance and divisions inherent in overzealous flag-waving. As Under-Sheriff of the City of London, More was navigating the May Day riots of 1517 and met the same intransigence as Neville when he invited the mob to place themselves in the shoes of the foreign workers against whom they were protesting and imagine the hardships they were forced to endure.

As a lawyer, theologian and philosopher More was an establishment grandee and therefore not open to the allegations of class betrayal and hypocrisy thrown at Neville. Neither was More affiliated to United, which heightens the antipathy when any takes to the soap box.

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Neville is an easy target, an often irritating, noisy participant in the football debate and increasingly in the political discourse. There is an ancient distrust within the working class of those who by luck or favour manage to claw themselves free of the structural privations that contain them.

However, instead of shouting him down, we should be applauding the pluck of a largely self-taught campaigner for engaging in public life when he could be high-rolling through the streets of Manchester, puffing on a fat cigar without a backward glance.

Personally, I would love it were Neville to wind his neck in on football matters and concentrate on building his business empire. I’m done with his United obsession and Overlap chat. But I’m all for his political engagement, his Red Nev zeal and willingness to speak up about the issues that divide us. That’s as British as it gets.

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