The King’s Portrait Is Up At Ibrox. That Club Is A Parody Of Itself Now.

Yesterday, the Ibrox club actually tweeted a picture out on social media of their new framed photo on the dressing room wall, the photo of the monarch. What a backward, reactionary, hick-town, hillbilly football club that is at times.

At a time when every club in football, it seems to me, wants to reach out and get more customers, at a time when it is positively dumb to be limiting your potential audience share, they have this as one of their USP’s. A USP is a marketing term for “unique selling point.” They are club of the monarchy. The club of the troops. The club of the establishment.

You know, the one that crawled out of the grave of one that didn’t pay its taxes thus denying the monarch their rightful share, thus forcing the troops to go without body armour and other essential equipment. You could not make that up, and thankfully you don’t have to. This is the club that still calls itself Rangers and will thus forever be linked to that scandal.

What does it look like from inside those walls, do you think? I’m not a great fan of The Bard – which his sort of sacrilegious when you’re growing up a writer in Scotland – but I always took a lot of pleasure from his wondrous ode to a head louse he spotted at church on a posh woman’s hat wondered what we’d see if we could look at ourselves the way others do.

That’s a skill which is uncommon enough, but it’s utterly alien over there.

They are a joke. Did you see the state of them on the last Remembrance Day? They had a cannon in the ground. A cannon. Ukrainian villages are screaming for artillery support, and there they were at Ibrox preening and strutting and mock firing a howitzer. It’s the fetishism of war by people who’ve never been near one. The paltry sum they raised summed it up.

Back when there was a club calling itself Rangers, they would have Britishness Days.

There’s not much different between those and the annual poppycock, and when the Queen snuffed it recently the Ibrox operation was one of the ones that went fully over the top in honouring her. All the forelock tugging is ludicrous to people like us, who see ourselves as citizens and not subjects, but it’s even more ridiculous when you consider the ethos behind it.

I have watched them for years, marching and doing their Halloween in July celebrations. They don’t understand half of the history that they think they do. They march because they have freedom. Freedom from Rome.

That’s what underpins it all. But they don’t realise that the events of their little holiday were funded by a Pope to prevent a British Catholic monarch from teaming up with the French monarchy and challenging the Church itself.

They don’t realise that they swapped a “tyrant in Rome” for one much closer to home, and that the whole modern idea of the British monarchy comes from the time of the Tudors, and how Henry VIII picked his fight with Rome because he wanted a divorce and when the Pope wouldn’t grant him one he formed the Church of England instead.

They even get the dates wrong.

The Battle of the Boyne, which they think they are commemorating, was fought on 1 July 1690. The one they are commemorating is the Battle of Aughrim, which was fought on 12 July 1691 – and the confusion comes because (and most of them have no idea about this) Ireland adopted the Gregorian Calendar, so named for the Pope who invented it, when “the Glorious 12th” was already part of their culture, and unfortunately Aughrim suddenly fell on 22 July.

Instead of, you know, just changing their traditions a wee bit they did what lazy bastards have done throughout history, and they changed what they were commemorating instead of the date on which they commemorated it. They celebrated the Boyne instead, the less important battle of the two, but which conveniently now fell on the 12th.

When Peepul can’t even get stuff like that right, how can they be trusted with the important things?

These Peepul are the least historically aware folk in this country, and yet they think of themselves as something special.

They think putting a picture up on a wall gives them some sort of kinship with Charles and his mad family. They would be as well starting The Church of Justin Beiber and sticking posters of him up all over the gaff.