The Celtic Fans Collective has shone the spotlight on Desmond. He better get used to it.

Celtic supporters understand power better than most because we’ve lived for years with a man who pulls the strings without ever needing to sit in the spotlight. Dermot Desmond built his reputation on staying out of view. He chose to operate quietly, shaping the club from behind the curtain.

That was fine for a long time. It even suited him.

Yet the moment he stepped forward and put himself in the public eye, the whole dynamic changed, and suddenly he looked like a man who didn’t want the attention he had dragged onto himself. He isn’t the first powerful figure to stumble the moment he stepped out of the shadows. History is full of men who ruled unseen until the day they pushed themselves into the light and paid the price.

For decades, the most powerful crime boss in the United States lived in a modest house on a modest street. He kept things simple while his captains flashed their wealth with big mansions and big cars. Carlo Gambino succeeded because he stayed invisible. He avoided interviews. He avoided photographers. His only brush with the law happened decades before his death. He kept everything low key. His successors didn’t.

Big Paul Castellano took over from Gambino and got shot in the street. John Gotti pulled the trigger on that particular era and then crowned himself boss. He treated publicity like oxygen. Gotti posed. He preened. He ended up on the front of Time magazine and enjoyed every second of it. The Justice Department, the FBI and every other alphabet agency in Washington didn’t enjoy it quite so much. They decided they were going to get him, and they did. Gambino died in his bed. Gotti died in a prison hospital after bringing the whole family down on the way to his own fall.

You can rule from the shadows or you can rule in full view if you grow up craving the attention. You can’t jump between the two. Once you step out of the dark and into the light, you stay there. You don’t get to hide again. You don’t get to put the genie back in the bottle.

The world tolerates the quiet operators. It tolerates the men who don’t wave their power around. It doesn’t tolerate the ones who suddenly want the spotlight and then freeze under it and who think they can slink back to the shadows. That’s not how it works.

A lot of the behind-the-scenes operators in British politics understood this. Some of them behaved disgracefully, and some of them pushed policies I hated, but a few were genuinely good at the job. They guided the leaders and shaped events. They made things happen without ever becoming household names.

That changed the moment they stepped in front of a camera.

During the Blair and Brown conflict, the two men waging the real war were not Blair and Brown. They were Alistair Campbell and Charlie Whelan. The second the public recognised them on sight, their careers in the shadows were over.

They had broken the one rule all spin doctors live by. Once you become the story, you become the problem. Years later we saw something similar with Dominic Cummings. Most people in the country had never heard his name until he decided he wanted the fame. He ran his own little court. His allies talked him up. They made sure he received the credit for the Brexit campaign and Boris Johnson’s election victory.

But then came his absurd Barnard Castle jaunt during the Covid lockdown. Then came that ridiculous, arrogant, tone-deaf press conference in the Downing Street Rose Garden, which he delivered as though he were Prime Minister.

From that moment, he was finished. Nobody in his world survives that kind of attention. Some people simply don’t function under that sort of pressure.

Our club is run by a man who is exactly like that. A man who ruled quietly for years, rarely spoke, rarely appeared and rarely put his name to anything. Dermot Desmond worked from the shadows because it suited him.

Desmond never courted publicity. He hated interviews. The man preferred to stay in the background, controlling events without ever getting dragged into the mess. He had power. We all know he had the wealth. He had influence. Yet he never flaunted any of it until this year.

Today the Celtic Fans Collective highlighted his record in a way that would never have happened if he had stayed in the background.

Once he forced his rule into every corner of Celtic Park, people inevitably started talking about him. And his snarling, petty public attack on Brendan Rodgers a few weeks ago pushed him into a place he has never been before: the centre of attention.

He should never have gone there. He should have remained the distant figure on the golf course. That reputation as the absentee landlord suited him far better than the one he has now. His tantrum over Rodgers destroyed his image as a composed, meticulous businessman. It revealed a thin-skinned bully who lashes out without thinking, a man whose confidence depends on surrounding himself with weaker people.

His rant at Rodgers showed us a man who tried to bend another strong personality to his will and couldn’t cope when Rodgers refused to bow. Rodgers walked rather than submit, and Desmond couldn’t handle the humiliation.

Now he sits in the brightest spotlight of his career, and he hates it.

Newspapers that once whispered his name now print it every day. Some of the coverage is sycophantic, but more of it is critical. More of it digs into his record. More of it asks the questions he never wanted to face. Even Celtic fan sites, which once avoided going after him too hard, now focus on him almost constantly.

Today, the club’s largest organised fan groups have condemned him in language that would have seemed unthinkable a few years ago. They see him for what he is and no longer care about sparing his feelings.

That’s his reality now. His future will unfold under a light he cannot switch off. He will stay in the consciousness of every Celtic supporter from now until the day he walks away. Reckless. Interfering. Petty. Dangerous.

That’s the reputation he has now, and he can’t change it. All he had to do was stay where he belonged, in the background, letting the board run things. Had he done that, he could have carried on ruling Celtic until he was in the ground.

Instead, he pushed himself into the front line. Now he carries the blame for everything that goes wrong, even when it isn’t his fault. That’s the price of stepping into the glare.

For years he built a wall of people around himself, men who absorbed the anger and the criticism while he stayed untouched. Now he has stripped them of authority. Nobody believes Nicholson or Lawwell junior can make a decision without Desmond’s sign-off. People still call them gutless or incompetent, but most fans know the truth. We all know where the orders come from.

As he has grown older, his ego has swollen while his judgement has shrunk. The imbalance shows. Under the pressure of real scrutiny, the cracks widen.

The spotlight isn’t moving. He has two options now. He can step out of the role entirely, or he can stay where he is and wither under that heat. Once, supporters tolerated him running things from the wings because he behaved like a professional. Now nobody knows what goes on in his head. He should have stayed on the golf course. Instead, he strode into the light. The fans have made their position clear; from here on in, the eyes of everyone will be on him. He will not find that comfortable or easy to take.