I have no sympathy for Ferguson. No Celtic fan will.

That’s a lovely West Wing moment, Toby. Ziegler, the communications director, is arguing with a pollster who’s trying to convince the president that the party has to support a constitutional amendment against burning the American flag.

After a particularly soaring piece of rhetoric—and I say that with sarcasm—the pollster looks at Toby and says, “He’s going to say I’m Satan,” and Toby shoots back with, “No, you’re the guy who runs into the 7-Eleven to get Satan a pack of cigarettes.”

It’s such a beautiful, brutal, shocking put-down. And it came to mind yesterday after I’d finished my Barry Ferguson piece, where I said that I sort of agree that he’s been treated with complete disrespect by the club—particularly the idea that they’re offering the job to a rookie when Ferguson himself has more experience than that.

Ferguson has it in his head, I’m sure, that we all hate his guts and that we’re all rooting for him to fail. But he’s not Satan. He’s just the guy who runs into the 7-Eleven to buy Satan his cigarettes.

Ferguson’s not really that important. He’s not a significant figure. He’s a minor irritation. We know we’re going to have much bigger fish to fry. Whoever gets the job on a so-called permanent basis next time has a ticking clock above his head from the moment he sits in the seat. That clock will run anywhere from 7 to 14 months, and we’ll probably land somewhere in the middle of that range.

I do think Ferguson has been pissed on a little bit by those at the club. But the truth is that I can’t muster even a shred of sympathy for him.

There’s a difference between thinking someone’s been hard done by and feeling sorry for them for being hard done by—and Ferguson is the living embodiment of that difference. It’s almost impossible to conceive of circumstances where I would feel even a scintilla of sympathy for someone like him, who sees the world through a very narrow prism, divides it into “us and them,” and thinks of those of us on the “them” side as being somehow lesser.

There are plenty of reasons to believe that Ferguson is getting exactly what he deserves. Take his refusal to condemn the shocking behaviour of his own supporters, on the multiple occasions they’ve crossed the line during his time in charge. Or his contemptuous statement about giving Celtic a guard of honour. Or the reckless and stupid defence of Vaclav Cerny when he pulled his little stunt with the water bottle at Celtic Park. A manager with any degree of respect for the opposition, or any sense of responsibility, would never have said those words.

Ferguson is like a lot of others on his side of the line. He is completely motivated by envy and dislike—hatred, even. There’s no room in his worldview for anything else, and he has acted exactly like the poster boy for his culture and that ethos. In short, he has fulfilled every one of the stereotypes we held up before he got the gig—that of an inarticulate boot-boy who, if he hadn’t been able to play football, would fulfil all sorts of other stereotypes which I’m not even going to go into.

In the aftermath of the game at Celtic Park, I wrote that it would be Ferguson’s career highlight. That’s as good as it is ever going to get. The win that day allowed him to believe he had a chance at the job. A chance to change the club. A chance to take on and beat Brendan Rodgers. He must have thought the world was stretched out in front of him.

But I said then, and I knew then, that it was never going to happen—that it would be his fondest memory, his greatest moment as a manager.

That was the summit of the mountain. And there were only two ways it could go, both of them leading down, both into similarly dark places.

In the first scenario, he got that win, climbed the mountain, and at the end of it was told he still wasn’t good enough even to be considered for the job. In the other, he got the job—and didn’t even make it to those seven months I talked about earlier before they threw him out the door, a figure of fun, hated by his own fans.

In both of those endings, he departs Ibrox a bitter, broken man. And I knew he would get one or the other. So that day really was his high point. Even the point he got against us at Ibrox didn’t bring him the slightest satisfaction, because by then it was already over. He knew it. Everyone else knew it.

And there was nothing he could do to change minds.

Ferguson is getting what he deserves. His anger yesterday—his rage, his frustration, his feeling of being disrespected and tossed aside like a piece of garbage—that makes me smile. And I never wanted to give the wrong impression about that. I don’t want to give the impression that I feel even a little bit sorry for him. I don’t. I don’t have any sympathy for the Devil—or for the guy who goes to get his cigarettes.