Britain’s Foremost Right-Wing Magazine Puts The Boot Into SFA Idiot Douglas Ross.

Oh man. You know it’s a bad day for an SFA official when he is being well and truly trashed in one of the media mouthpieces of the right. That’s the situation that the dire linesman and arrogant eejit Douglas Ross finds himself in today though.

Ross is not just a crap official with an overt bias towards Ibrox.

He is also the leader of the Scottish Tories, and that’s clearly something that should disqualify him when at least one ground carries adverts for the SNP and when he’s made public pronouncements which directly relate to our club.

Quite how the conflict of interest smell isn’t wafting up the Hampden stairs would be a mystery if it wasn’t so obvious. If he was a pro-Celtic public figure his feet wouldn’t touch the ground.

Ross is terrible as an official, but as bad as he is he is even worse at politics and his “leadership” of the Scottish Tories taken a terrible toll on their poll ratings.

I was never a fan of Ruth Davidson in spite of her liberal leanings – it’s hard to stomach someone who plays the sectarian card for electoral purposes as she did – but as an observer of the game and a former participant, I have to admit that she was damned good at politics.

He is truly awful, and the tanking his party will take at the next elections will ably demonstrate that fact if he even lasts that long.

It is for this lamentable lack of skills in that arena that he’s the subject of an excoriating article in The Spectator, the magazine which is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the intellectual grounding for the policies of the right. (I say that with no sense of irony; they have a fine writing staff including a few genius wordsmiths.)

Stephen Daisley – who also writes for the despicable Scottish Daily Mail – is not one of them, but he writes coherently and when I say he’s unimpressed by Ross that’s an understatement

. In the piece entitled “The preventable death of the Scottish Tories” he does not miss the target.

“Douglas Ross has had a rotten run of luck … but he has also been guilty of a number of unforced errors. He is acutely unpopular with the party’s grassroots, not least for demanding Johnson’s resignation over Downing Street parties then U-turning when the Ukraine war began and it seemed the PM was staying put. For the former, they regard him as a traitor (their word, not mine) and, for the latter, a shitebag (ditto) …”

Ouch. I burst out laughing reading that.

Things hardly improve in the next section.

“(If) taking a stand on his Prime Minister misleading parliament showed a bit of backbone, Ross’s political spine swiftly turned to jelly and the Ukraine U-turn, although at least partly sincere, marked him out as a flip-flopper. There have been rumblings about his leadership for a while now and these polls will only pump up the volume. Showing the part-time referee a red card would salve the frustrations of many a rank-and-file Scottish Tory but the uncomfortable truth is that the talent pool for replacing him is shallow.”

That’s hardly the stuff of which political legacies are made; they would get rid of him, but for fear that they might actually do worse. That’s no excuse though for the SFA leaving him in place as a referee.

The game would be better without his taint on it.