David Murray is publishing an autobiography. Only the Celtic sites will review it truthfully.

So, today some of the media is reporting with much excitement that David Murray is due to publish his autobiography this year, and if you are less than excited, then that would make at least two of us.

Because I think that strutting fool’s autobiography is the last thing we need whilst the consequences of his time in the game here are still being felt not just at the new club across the city, but across the wider game.

To my mind, the best book about Murray that’s going to be written has already been written. It was written by Stephen O’Donnell, and it’s called Fergus McCann vs David Murray, about the rivalry that Murray doubtless thought he dominated, but which shattered the club that he ran and was a severe blow to his own egotism because McCann won that battle—and I’ve never doubted it for a minute.

Not only did Fergus restore Celtic to its place as the top club in the country, but he rebuilt the stadium and turned the club into a commercial machine.

In his first-rate essay Benefit of Clergy, which was about the autobiography of Salvador Dali, George Orwell said the following:

“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats … Dali is even by his own diagnosis narcissistic, and his autobiography is simply a strip-tease act conducted in pink limelight.”

Well, Murray is way beyond narcissistic.

He is better characterised as a megalomaniac, and I can think of few people in the recent history of Scotland who would be less inclined to offer the non-disgraceful version of his life.

I can think of few people whose paths we’ve ever crossed whose self-told life story will be quite so astonishingly self-serving and designed to, as the song once said, “accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.”

The most honest thing about that book will be his name on the cover. And short of the complete works of Hugh Keevins, I can’t think of anything I’d less like to read in terms of learning something illuminating—or factual.

I mean, just look at what the blurb says about the book:

“He led the talks on the Old Firm clubs joining the English football pyramid, while his sale of the club to Craig Whyte set off a chain of events that eventually saw the club liquidated.”

Straight away, you can see where this is going, right?

He led talks on the Glasgow clubs joining the English pyramid. Well, what good is that to anyone, since neither of them ever did? We’re still here in Scotland. So that’s a story of failure rather than of success.

But he’s already tried to spin it as a story of success.

And the chain of events that eventually saw the club liquidated didn’t start with the sale to Craig Whyte. Craig Whyte was another step down that path, but it was David Murray and his policies which set the club on that path in the first place.

If the whole thing’s like that—which I expect it will be—would there be any point in buying the book? Because it’s just going to be a vast rewrite of history, a vast retelling of everything that we already know. And I can already tell you that some people in the Scottish media will review that book and eat it up.

Do you know how many people reviewed Stephen O’Donnell’s book?

Professional journalists?

None. Not one. It is the only history that has been published thus far on the conflict between Murray and McCann—a conflict which defined this game in the modern era—and not a single national title wrote any kind of review of it at all.

But our press does love a rewrite of history.

The whole Survival Lie is a rewrite of history. So is the Victim Lie. I won’t be surprised if this book is reviewed and gets five stars as being a “definitive account.”

I am sure that is the intention of the author—to create a definitive account to stand in for all the other accounts. The actual ones. The factual ones. The ones that will tell the true story, the complete story—and not just offer the David Murray perspective on it, which is the last perspective we should be trusting.

What is his lasting monument in Scottish football except that the club at Ibrox is Rangers in name only? Even the training ground, which he egotistically named after himself, no longer bears that name because the people who bought the Ibrox assets couldn’t stomach the idea of having it on it.

All he left behind him was rubble and wreckage. But like a lot of people who’ve left behind rubble and wreckage, he now wants to “set the record straight.”

In short, he wants to find a way to blame someone else for the damage he did and you can tell already that Whyte is in the crosshairs. You can tell already that Scottish football itself will get part of the blame.

I’m half tempted to actually get the book and review it myself, so that we have at least one honest examination of what is in it. But to be quite honest, I cannot stomach the thought of working my way through a bunch of self-serving bullshit, which is exactly all it’ll be. So I’ll wait for the extended highlights. I’ll wait for someone else to do it. I’ll wait for the selective quotes that try to make Murray look as good as they possibly can, and I’ll do a proper examination of those instead.

I doubt the book’s going to be a good seller. Who the hell wants to buy it? I’m sure there are a handful of Ibrox supporters who are still willing to forgive and forget, who are still of the belief that their club was not destroyed by Murray but by other people and by a malicious conspiracy, rather than just by his plain and simple mismanagement.

But there aren’t enough of those people, I don’t think, to put this book on the bestseller lists or to make it worthwhile for the publisher to even bother putting it into print. It’s entirely possible that the most money that book will make is from the serialisation rights to mainstream media outlets.

Frankly, I think it’s laughable that he thinks he can get away with this. I think it’s incredible that he has the brass neck to think that his story will be of interest to anybody outside of the margins.

It takes a certain type of arrogance to even write an autobiography in the first place. But to think anyone wants to learn the secrets of a failed football chairman … that takes a special kind of ego.

But that’s Murray for you. That’s what he’s always been. That’s one of the reasons McCann beat him and why we are still standing and Rangers is not.