Way back in the early days of New Labour, two rival courts started to form within the government; one in Downing Street, where Blair held the reigns, and the other at the Treasury, which was the kingdom of Gordon Brown. Blair knew it was a mistake to allow this, but he was largely powerless to stop it from happening.
He did try to control it, albeit briefly, by demanding that Brown dispense with the services of Charlie Whelan, his press secretary, who was notorious even then for the way he would burn down anyone who threatened his master.
Brown would not give in on the issue. Whelan, he said, was essential to his operation over there. Blair demurred, which he would have cause to regret for years to come. Whelan eventually torpedoed one of the centrepieces of Blair’s political ambitions, the objective of leading Britain into the Single European Currency. And he did it from a pub.
During the sequence of events which led to his infamous piece of on-the-hoof bar room policy making, where he spun a fairly innocuous Gordon Brown quote into an outright rejection of the UK joining the ECU, a Financial Times story had hit saying the government was making preparations to join. Brown told him to “kill it” and Whelan called the journalist in question and called the story “a package of bollocks.” That didn’t have quite the effect he had intended; the journalist wrote a follow up saying the story had been confirmed.
Why would a hack not working for The Daily Record do such a thing? Well, it was because Charlie Whelan himself had appeared on a TV documentary about the early days of the government where he offered the interviewer a glimpse into how New Labour conducted itself with the press. “You just have to be economical with the truth,” he said. “But they understand,” he added, meaning the media. “They’ll understand tomorrow and forgive me.”
He then proceeded to decode the nods and winks that he would offer to those journalists who were inside the circle, and wrote with – as he saw it – the Treasury’s approval. Telling one of these lucky few reporters that a story was “bollocks” meant that it was true. “Total bollocks” was an even more iron clad confirmation. Saying it was “speculation” was the Treasury’s way of saying “get it written and filed before the end of the day.”
So when Whelan denied the Financial Times story with his colourful phrase what else was the journalist supposed to think?
The line between truth and fiction had been blurred so much that it was a simple mistake to make.
Had Dave King ever uttered more than a handful of words of truth, interspersed with the absolute fiction he comes out with on a routine basis, I could understand today’s headlines, which have lauded his latest sit down with a group of tame hacks.
But all King gives these people is bollocks, time and time again.
And time and time again they write it as if it were something else.
The thing with King is that there is literally no code to crack beyond that which a South African judge has already laid out; he lies about everything, about matters great and matters small, he lies when he has to, when he doesn’t have to, he lies when an idea pops into his head that sounds better than the truth.
King is addicted to lying, and he is a braggart and blusterer, and a bully … and like most of these guys he is actually a coward.
I read his “interviews” today with a sense of wonderment, but it was not wonderment at the words themselves, because they are typical King. Arrogant, preening, self-promoting, a mixture of lies, evasions and outright delusions. No, it was wonderment at the people who sat across the table, licking their lips, as he served up this swill to them.
You knew just looking at their names; Chris Jack and Roddy Forsyth amongst them. The second I saw the headline in The Telegraph about him threatening to sue Warburton I knew Forsyth had written that piece. The second I saw he’d done a Q&A with The Herald I knew it would be with Chris Jack, and I knew that these favoured pet writers would not only write what he told them but interpret it all exactly as he instructed them to.
They are pathetic men, and a disgrace to their professions.
He has accused Warburton of being “thin skinned.” That’s no secret; I wrote much the same myself. But as a former employer and someone getting sued by this guy, that’s poking the hornets’ nest for no other reason than he likes it. His threat to counter sue both Notts Forest and Warburton is pathetic posturing; not for one second will he have the bottle to actually file such a complaint. But he seems to love litigation and the idea of it. His comments about not being able to have a “confidential conversation” with his former manager are libellous and I hope that Warburton and his management team are paying close attention to them.
The section where he talks about Sports Direct is just plain ridiculous. He veers between threats and criticism to offering an olive branch and has expressed his “confidence” that a deal can be done that lets them continue to work with the club. Eah? How can anyone believe that? King is suing them. They are suing him. Ashley tried to have him thrown in jail. King has called him out as a parasite and has been the vocal leader of a year’s long boycott of the merchandise. Ashley has raised numerous actions against him and reported him to the Stock Exchange. King continues to blame every ill the club has on the Sports Direct magnate. How in the Hell can anyone think that such a rapprochement is either possible or even desirable?
This is a relationship way past the point of saving.
Other things he raises are frankly deranged. Celtic have had “an easy run of it” in getting to the Champions League, because they are “not there to take it away from them.” Excuse me? An easy run of what? Getting to the Groups? Six qualifiers? In the same section of this rambling, shambling nonsense he contradicted this view by talking about how Aberdeen ran us “close” last season. Yeah. Which is why the title was wrapped up with six weeks to go.
Of his “promised £30 million” he claims half has already been spent. He says it will probably now take “more than £30 million.” As nobody, anywhere, can verify that he’s spent that so far there’s really no way for anyone to validate such a thing.
If Sevco fans really believe £15 million has been “invested” by this guy in the last two years they must button up the back. Another phantom £15 million tranche of finance will, I’d predict, have the same visible effect, which is to say none whatsoever.
Alarm bells should be ringing at UEFA and the SFA over this interview too.
He claims to have told fans that shareholder “soft loans” would be needed for three years; I don’t recall him every having uttered such a thing, but there you go.
That “strategy” has a year left to run … but in front of those hacks the guy who was claiming the very same day that the club was “back in profit” told them that the soft loans policy would have to continue past next season and into the unspecified future.
Losses on top of losses, year on year. That’s the prediction, right out of his own mouth. Hampden blazers and club chairmen take note; this guy is committing his club to financial doping for the foreseeable. Maybe that’s okay with you.
I would think UEFA will have a slightly different take on things.
I could go on. This guy rambled on about so many subjects and took shots at so many people – including The Takeover Panel; amongst this nonsense was a suggestion he might appeal. To who? God? – that I could get ten articles out of it, but I’d be exhausted long before the end and fed up with the lot of it.
The way he’s talking, he’s got the backing of the board to continue in his post. I hope he means it. I hope I’m wrong to think this is a guy talking his way towards the exit. There were signs of that, you know. He talked about wanting a chairman for the club based here, about how he wants to spend less time In Scotland than he does now, and about how he could still influence things because of his shareholding whether he was on the board or not … dire stuff if you are a Sevco fan who wants to be rid of this cretin once and for all, but music to the ears of the rest of us who know this guy is a disaster on so many levels.
I suspect the half-hearted overture to Sports Direct is also more important than it looks; he’s paving the groundwork either for failure in court or the club dropping the litigation before then. He’s trying to dress it up as a scenario where he got what he wanted; watch that situation as it unfolds and tell me if that sounds crazy. I’ll look at that in more detail later.
But overall, you sift the words this guy says and what you find, constantly, is more fiction than fact. The grains of truth in there are usually unpleasant ones, such as his admission that the club will rely on shareholder soft loans far into the future … but on top of them he ladles so much utter nonsense that the point gets lost … which is the intention, of course.
Charlie Whelan’s career in government came to an unsurprisingly bad ending; he was finally fired after leaking details about Peter Mandelson’s mortgage, which was the affair that caused his first resignation from government. Whelan was later implicated in the Damian McBride email scandal, where his fellow Brown spin-doctor lost his job for planning to set up an internet site with the purpose of smearing political opponents.
Theirs is a brutal profession, but these guys took it to the extremes.
Sevco has Jim Traynor, who can still find tame hacks willing to believe King’s package of bollocks. Stuff like this can suspend disbelief for a day, amongst the gullible, but there is no plan here, just a lot of hot air and bluster.
Job done, King has retreated back across the water.
It will be for those he leaves behind at Ibrox to actually try and deliver on these grandiose promises, outright fantasies, vainglorious boasts and psychotic flights of fancy.
I am glad he’s talking about sticking around. I bet some of them aren’t so happy.