It takes Peepul with no sense of perspective, or irony, whatsoever to accuse someone of peddling untruths and defaming others in the same statement as they peddle untruths, rant about conspiracies and throw in defamatory statements just for kicks.
But this is what we’ve come to expect from the Ibrox PR machine, and today its arms have been very busy indeed. In a rambling press release who’s author you don’t have to work hard to identify, they attacked the BBC and Stewart himself in the kind of inflammatory language we’ve come to expect. And when the lunatics have the run of the asylum like this you shouldn’t be surprised if the other inmates of Bedlam are throwing their shit at the walls.
The club’s own statement is deranged. It really is.
Harkening back to the old theory that the BBC hates them, Sevco makes it abundantly clear that what they wanted here was Michael Stewart’s head on a stick.
Put bluntly, the club tried – in vain – to get the BBC to fire a journalist because he did his job.
That’s the upshot of it, and having not got that they are wailing like a kid at a party who dropped his ice cream on the floor. The self-inflicted nature of this is just one of the things that makes it so funny when you’re looking at it from the outside.
But Stewart assailed these Peepul for promoting dangerous ideas … and today one of our senior football clubs has painted targets on people’s backs. The SFA’s silence as Sevco uses its PR arm to wage vendettas against its perceived “enemies” is ridiculous.
The BBC itself has shown weakness and the Ibrox club is emboldened to go on the rampage.
How long this is allowed to continue remains to be seen.
That all of it is manifestly self-defeating makes it all the more delicious and unfathomable; at a time when they are scrambling around madly trying to find someone who will manufacture their jerseys for next season, this is the image the club wants to present to the world; that of a fat, drunk guy raging in a boozer. There must be people on their board who are seriously embarrassed by this conduct; we should be grateful that they are too weak to call time on it.
Frankly, those people, and Sevco itself, deserve everything they get.
The stink of lunacy wafts out of that place like the rasping reek you inhale being around a brewery. The clue to what PR is about lies in the second word; relations. They’ve clearly misunderstood it, or they have chosen to base all their relationships with the world on the Oscar Pistorius method.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the idea of creating a siege mentality.
But we’ve all seen Downfall by now, right?
They weren’t getting their act together down in the Fuhrer Bunker as much as coming apart at the seams. Whenever I see them celebrating a win these days I am reminded that Eva Braun did try and throw Hitler a birthday party during the mayhem.
A Russian artillery shell blew out one of the walls and ended the festivities early.
Aside from letting Traynor take over the typing pool, it’s worth remembering that their shareholder organisation operates under the club’s aegis as well.
Indeed, it sometimes seems to me that there’s a competition within the walls to see whose statements are the more moon-howling. Sometimes the club gets theirs out first and sometimes its Club 1872, and the efforts by one to outdo the other are frequently worth a round of applause at least.
But the fan organisation takes the prize today, and the standing ovation with it, for their own statement, which is so crazed that I could see the foam dripping from the underside of my monitor as I was reading it.
It is a masterpiece of nuttiness so great I half wish we could get Brad Pitt to do a precis of it as his Twelve Monkey’s character Jeffery Goines, just to put the icing on the cake.
Unfortunately for them, it is also libellous. As I said at the top of the piece, it really is something to read something that accuses others of peddling hate and spreading lies whilst it goes much, much further. To say that Stewart was dismissive of racism is a big enough lie but to go on to claim that he was partly responsible for the assault on Traynor is a deplorable, and it is actionable. They could find themselves in real trouble.
And they should.
There’s a bigger article to be done on this, but Sevco’s war with the press has now erupted full-force.
That club does not want scrutiny of any sort, and they are no longer shy about aggressively coming after those who give it to them. If the media is going to be able to function in relation to that club, they have to defend Stewart from this attack.