Celtic’s board needs some PRP.

In the United States Air Force, and in particular among those whose job it is to handle nuclear weapons, there’s something called the Personnel Reliability Programme.

You have to pass PRP. There are no exceptions.

The key principle is simple: they don’t want unstable people with their fingers on the nuclear triggers. PRP is designed to make sure only reliable, rational individuals are allowed to participate in the insanity of ending the world.

It is not its only contradiction. PRP is as mad as the acronym which governs nuclear brinksmanship. You can fail PRP for being too happy just as readily as you can fail it for being too sad. You can fail it for thinking too much of home and for not thinking about home at all. You can fail PRP for excessive talking. You can fail it for excessive silence. It’s a minefield.

But here’s the biggest contradiction of all. The politicians never have to take PRP tests. They’re the ones who ultimately make the call on the lives and deaths of millions of people, and nobody ever asks them to prove they’re fit or mentally robust enough to do that job and there probably isn’t a more critical question in the world.

They inherit that power by virtue of the office they hold. The soldiers need to pass the test. The people with the authority to put the wheels in motion don’t.

And that brings me to the people who run this club.

Whenever fans push for influence at their clubs, we’re told the same thing: supporters are too emotional, too volatile, too much like a mob to be trusted with serious decisions. It’s the stock line whenever anyone dares to suggest we should have a real say in how Celtic is run.

Meanwhile, the people sitting at the top of Celtic are assumed to have good judgement, the skills to negotiate, and the ability to navigate a footballing landscape that changes with every passing season. There are no checks on their ambition, no screening for integrity, no vetting for competence. And that’s how you end up with a strategy formulated twenty years ago still guiding Celtic in the modern game.

That’s the weird thing about PRP.

Soldiers are assumed to be unreliable until they prove otherwise.

Politicians are assumed to be competent until they fail.

When fans are assumed to be fools and we presume that directors aren’t that sometimes leads to untested, unsuitable people sitting in the big chairs with their fingers over the big red buttons. And sometimes clubs collapse as a result.

For years those running this club have coasted. I make no bones about that.

The only reason the flaws in our system haven’t blown up in our faces already is that we’ve had trophy-winning managers in our dugout and a shambolic opponent across the city.

But when our directors have been tested – really tested – the rust is obvious. You can see it flaking away, just like you would on an old silo door.

In PRP, it isn’t just a vibe check. It’s a framework.

There are disqualification criteria — concrete triggers that get you suspended, decertified, removed from duties, or even dishonourably discharged.

Alcohol or drug misuse, untreated mental illness, serious financial irresponsibility, security violations, criminal conduct, repeated negligence, even significant medical conditions. All of these are continuously monitored. Passing once doesn’t exempt you forever.

No boardroom in the country, and certainly not ours, has anything like that kind of accountability. And PRP doesn’t stop there.

It also includes structural safeguards: the Two-Person Concept and No-Lone Zones. In practice, that means you’re never alone with a warhead.

Two people have to be present at all times. Each watches the other. No one person can ever launch a missile. The system assumes people are fallible, and it is built to mitigate that.

Now imagine we had something like that at Celtic. Not psychological testing — values testing. Reliability testing. Accountability where if you make a mistake, you pay for it.

What would count as a disqualifying action in the Celtic boardroom?

Briefing against the manager, certainly. Chronic strategic drift, where your “plan” is indistinguishable from the one you trotted out for the last decade, with your only benchmark staying one step ahead of a basket-case rival. That’s operational unreliability.

Conflicts of interest, vanity projects, nepotism, putting personal or family agendas before sound strategic decision-making — compromised judgement.

Contempt for supporters, where you refuse to engage with those who keep the lights on, is a failure of integrity. Opaque transfer business and repeated European humiliation are negligence by another name.

And imagine if we had our own Two-Person Concept. No major strategic decision could be made by a single individual.

Managerial appointments, European strategy, capital spending, all would need more than one sign-off. Think of the nuclear launch centres: two keys, spaced far apart, both need to be turned simultaneously. At Celtic, that could be a three-person committee with veto powers, or independent oversight that ensures no one person can ever run roughshod over the club.

That would end the culture where one man dictates terms and everyone else falls into line. It would build counterweights. It would make sure no single personality could dominate the way we’ve seen happen.

And yes, the pushback is predictable. “That would slow things down.” Good. It’s better to move slowly and make the right decision than to move fast and make a disastrous one.

If such checks had been in place, Mark Lawwell’s appointment might never have happened. The reputational damage from Peter Lawwell’s return to the chairmanship might have been avoided. These are things that should have been obvious to anyone with even the faintest grasp of PR or media strategy.

Instead, we have prestige without scrutiny. Authority without oversight. Directors who enjoy the status but hate the spotlight.

They want to be “masters of the universe,” but at a remove, and they squirm when the cameras cut to the directors’ box during televised protests. They don’t like having to answer for themselves. But here’s the thing: they work for Celtic, not for themselves. And too many of them seem to have forgotten that.

Let’s remember that PRP is ongoing. Just because you passed last year doesn’t mean you’ll pass this year. It’s continuous evaluation. Past success never exempts you from present scrutiny. Our board seems to forget that too.

That’s what we need at Celtic. We can’t impose PRP on our directors, but we can hold them to account against our own standards. We can say: prove you’re still fit to govern. Prove you’re reliable. Prove your judgement is sound under stress.

Give us a documented European strategy. A clear transfer framework with deadlines and timelines. A proper recruitment model and spending profile. A ring-fenced football budget, managed by football people, not accountants. Independent oversight to ensure directors don’t have unchecked power.

We don’t have nuclear codes, but it does not mean that we don’t need safeguards. And right now, we don’t have them.

Those who say that it’s fans who might destabilise the club miss the point completely. It is never the supporters who detonate a football institution. It is always those inside the walls, the ones with their hands on the shiny little keys.

They’re the ones who walk us into storms. They’re the ones who set the chain reactions in motion. And unless we build systems that assume fallibility, and guard against it, they’ll keep on doing it. No more of this.