Graham Resigns But Other Heads Should Roll

After less than a week in the job, Chris Graham has resigned from the Ibrox board.

We predicted this, of course, because this appointment was ludicrous in every conceivable way.

He was, and is, the walking epitome of a guy who’s intellect is outstripped, time and again, by a mind-bending lack of common sense, or any semblance of self-control.

He was never a fit and proper person to serve on the board of any football club, anywhere, far less one with a history of discriminatory practices and for him to have stayed beyond the public disclosure of his anti-Islamic tweet would have been impossible.

This a PR calamity for Sevco Rangers, but one of their own making and there is not a single person in Scotland who should have the slightest sympathy for them, or for Graham himself.

This is a guy who campaigned for people to lose their jobs. Who led a boycott which drove his own club into the arms of a predatory businessman who is still sucking them dry. This is a guy who created an “enemies list” including journalists, bloggers and directors and officials of other clubs, almost as if he was daring the lunatic fringe to do their worst.

He has slandered the former Celtic manager Neil Lennon online and has made potentially defamatory comments against numerous others including Peter Lawwell.

His cartoon tweet reveals him as a halfwit at best, and at worst a racist bigot and homophobe.

There is simply no place in Scottish football governance – at any level – for someone who holds these sort of views.

This has been proved time and again, with the sacking of Hugh Dallas for his own sectarian views a case in point.

The thing is; none of this is, or was, a secret.

It’s not for nothing that Celtic cyberspace was highlighting this guy’s behaviour from almost the moment he was appointed.

Chris Graham might have made his online activity private now, but he’s never been shy about expressing his views, however reactionary and ridiculous they are, to a wide audience.

Despite this, he remained a media darling; the go-to guy for everything Sevco related.

The broadcasters and newspapers have their own questions to answer about why they continually put someone with these views on the air.

I don’t expect to hear them provide any.

The press in Scotland has a “deaf dumb and blind” attitude to this stuff that is every bit as repellent as some of Graham’s views.

They are hypocrites and frauds too scared to do their jobs.

The real questions have to be answered at Ibrox though, because whoever thought that someone like this was a “fit and proper person” to be on the board of directors there needs to be identified, and their own resignation should follow post haste.

Either no-one on their board did even the remotest due diligence on Graham – which is ridiculous; his views were out there for all to see – or they simply did not care.

You have to wonder, when you see the makeup of the guest list for the directors box the other night, as well as considering the appointment itself, just how deeply reflected Graham’s paranoid, gutter rantings are within the club itself, under its new patrons.

The more one examines the “new regime” at Ibrox the more tempted one is to suggest that when these people use the term “real Rangers men” to describe themselves, they are actually talking about a sub-sect of the support, and of our species, which has no place in a modern society.

When thy talk about their “traditions” it’s hard not to conclude that they are harking back to orange jerseys, the pitch cut in the shape of a Sash and when the green straw remover still had a job inside the catering department.

Backward, bitter and bigoted. Is that where they’re headed again?

It’s quite clear from this appointment – and its all too predictable ending – that something is rotten inside Ibrox, and needs to be cleared out and fast.

Graham’s head has already rolled down the Asbestos Staircase.

It ought not to be the last one which does.