“I’m the invisible man. Incredible how you can see right through me …” – Queen.
You know why Ian Bankier finishes last on the Guilt List?
Because Ian Bankier, although chairman of our club, is so anonymous and disengaged from the reality of day-to-day life at Celtic Park that I only included him as a courtesy. He is utterly irrelevant.
There are a lot of euphemisms which come to mind when we think of Ian Bankier, most of them in relation to how useless he is. But nothing is more damning than the sure and certain knowledge that none of them come close to summing him up.
Whenever Celtic is being talked about in terms of the projection of power or who makes the decisions two names come up over and over again; Desmond and Lawwell.
Nobody considers Bankier a force to be reckoned with.
The media barely mentions him at all.
The last two Celtic chairmen have been forceful, powerful men used to dominating every conversation and room.
Brian Quinn was a member of the IMF and the deputy governor of the Bank of England.
John Reid was a former cabinet minister.
These men were not afraid to be in the news; indeed, Reid was rarely out of it and I reckon he was a huge and influential part of our club’s confident and aggressive posture between the time he was appointed and the time he left.
I regret his departure in October 2011.
With hindsight it was disastrous.
I think his position on the status of Rangers might have been worth hearing.
Bankier does not inspire confidence or fear or awe in the way men of this stature do.
With respect to his accomplishments in his own field, he’s a whiskey salesman.
He’s not a leader of men, and that’s what the job requires especially in the shadow of men like Lawwell and Desmond.
Reid was not afraid to step out of that shadow. Bankier lives in it.
He is here because you cannot mention this crisis with apportioning some of the blame at the man who runs the club, even if he’s a total nonentity.
Indeed, it is his lack of charisma, his lack of a public profile of any sort and the obvious way he defers to the “judgement” of the largest shareholder and the CEO that makes his especially culpable even if he took not one single decision of note during the course of this thing.
Because that’s what damns him.