No Exit for those in Celtic Hell.

There is a scene in The Thick of It where Malcolm Tucker finally snaps. It reminds me a lot of where Celtic are right now, in the cease-fire zone between fans and board.

It is not really a cease-fire, of course, it’s more like the famous World War I Christmas Armistice, which saw football played on No Mans Land.

Tucker, on a full meltdown in front of Terri Covley, the hapless civil servant, he describes the mood in Downing Street. The room is full. Tempers are frayed. Everyone is talking, nobody is listening and the air is thick with blame.

Who did what. Who failed to act. Which of them should have known better. It is not a meeting anymore. It is a meltdown. A system collapsing in on itself in real time.

The way Tucker describes it, you think, “this is what it looks like when people in power lose control of events.”

And you cannot help but wonder if that is what Celtic’s boardroom feels like right now.

Not the shouting. Not necessarily. These are corporate men. There will be no table-thumping, no theatrical outbursts. But that does not mean there is calm. It does not mean there is unity. It does not mean there is clarity.

Because there is no way everyone in that room sees things the same way.

There will be people in there who know, deep down, that mistakes have been made. Others will believe those mistakes have been exaggerated. Some will think Celtic has been too passive. Others will insist the club has taken the only sensible course. Some will want confrontation. Others will argue for caution.

And all of them are stuck with each other.

That is where No Exit comes in.

Jean-Paul Sartre built his masterpiece on a simple idea. Hell is not fire or punishment. Hell is other people. It means being trapped in a room where you cannot escape the judgement of those around you, where every decision, every failure and every hesitation stands exposed and cannot be undone.

There is no exit.

In that kind of environment, silence does not mean agreement.

Because it often means the opposite. Often it means people biting their tongues. It means people choosing their words carefully. It means people thinking things they cannot or will not say out loud.

Because once those things are said, you cannot take them back.

Can you even imagine sitting in that room if you pushed for a decision that has clearly backfired. Imagine sitting there if you argued against it and were ignored. Imagine knowing that others in the room know exactly where you stood and what you did.

That is pressure. That is tension.

It is the kind of atmosphere where trust begins to erode.

Boards can survive bad decisions. They cannot easily survive the loss of confidence in each other. Once people start to question the judgement of those sitting beside them, every conversation becomes harder. Every decision becomes slower. Every disagreement carries more weight.

And all the while, the outside world sees… nothing. From the outside, it looks like silence. It looks like inaction. It looks like a lack of leadership. Celtic fans are very familiar with that.

Inside, it might be something very different.

It might be a room where nobody quite agrees on what has gone wrong or how to fix it. It might be a room where some want to take a stand and others fear the consequences of doing so. Or it might be a room where the past few weeks have exposed fault lines that were always there but never fully tested.

That is the unsettling part. Because when a system reaches that point, it becomes harder to act decisively. Not easier.

Every option carries risk and every statement has implications. Every move has to be weighed not just against the external situation but against the internal dynamics of the people making it.

That is how paralysis sets in.

Not because nobody cares, but because too many people care about different things in different ways. And so the room tightens.

The conversations loop.

The same arguments come back around again and again, slightly reworded, slightly reframed, but never fully resolved.

No exit.

You do not need Malcolm Tucker in that room for it to feel like chaos. You do not need raised voices for there to be conflict. Sometimes the most dysfunctional environments are the quietest ones, where everything important goes unsaid.

That is what makes this moment so difficult to read from the outside.

We do not know who is arguing for what nor who believes what. We do not know whether there are people inside that room who are as frustrated as the supporters outside it. But it is impossible to believe there are not.

Because the events of the past months have been too significant. The scrutiny has been too intense. The questions have been too obvious.

Somebody, somewhere in that room, must be asking them. The problem is that asking the questions is not the same as answering them.

And until that happens, until something breaks the cycle, until someone takes control of the narrative and sets a direction, the boardroom risks becoming exactly what Sartre warned about.

A closed room. Full of people. With no way out. Not until Daddy Desmond says its okay, because he doesn’t want to be seen pandering to the mob. Just torture. Day in day out. And no exit in sight.

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