Few credible organisations, far less football clubs, would have hired a DUP representative to run their public relations. The appointment had the acidic reek of madness about it from the moment it was announced.
We were not to be disappointed.
Almost from the moment he was hired it started; the lunacy.
The ranting.
We thought we had gotten used to bizarre, almost psychotic, statements out of that club during the era when Traynor held the pen in his sweaty hands. The best was still to come.
If organisations are sometimes judged by the way they relate to the rest of the world, that’s because their PR is either first rate or disastrously ill-judged. Under this guy Ibrox’s policies and image became ever more the complete inverse of what the term “public relations” should mean. They were brazenly hostile, even rabid at times.
We had come to expect that, but the venom of their pronouncements in recent years has been unmatched. They have complained and bitched and snarked about everything and nothing, seeking to make enemies everywhere.
Their relations with other clubs remains abysmal.
The Australia fiasco seemed to sum them up, a comedy of errors and irrationality which could only have come from a company which no longer cared how the world viewed them.
Celtic fans are apparently the only people who will miss this guy.
The hacks hated him and feared him and its more than possible that he was the architect of their lunatic press policy, which I’ve got a piece on for later.
Their fans could not stand the guy.
Even those who didn’t wince at the appointment itself lament the club’s whole public relations operation and accuse those running it of paying lip service to them and only caring about money.
It was, in short, an appointment every bit as disastrous as it appeared to be when they did it.
The press largely accepted it except for a handful, like Speirs, who pointed out that it was an utter embarrassment.
The club said he left for “personal reasons” but this comes after a spell in which they’ve been doing the rounds trying to clean up the messes of the past couple of years, culminating in a very public humiliation at the hands of Neil Doncaster.
Not all of it was this guy’s fault, and it is tempting to suggest that he is no more than the convenient scapegoat for the glaring errors made by others, but the fact is that the appointment itself was like a Celtic bloggers idea of the sort that incompetent bigots would have made, and although this particular writer has enjoyed the spectacle his high profile presence at a club within Scottish football was a dire stain on the whole game, and one we’re better off without.