Bitter anti-Celtic hack tries political writing with hilarious results.

As long-term observers of bad football writing, we all know there are bad columns, there are stupid columns, and then there are those rare masterpieces of self-satisfaction where a man sits down, writes something so gloriously thick that you can only stare at it in wonder, and then sends it into the world apparently convinced he has just reshaped the national debate.

Bill Leckie has written one of those today. Bill Leckie. One of the worst writers in Scotland, a man who cannot write intelligently about sport, a subject which has produced more writers of all different sorts than just about any other subject.

Now, Scottish football fans have had to endure this man’s nonsense for years. We know the drill. Loud declarations. Half-baked opinions. The decorative language of certainty wrapped around arguments with all the structural integrity of damp cardboard.

In football, that sort of thing is annoying enough.

You sigh, roll your eyes, maybe laugh if he has really overreached himself, and move on.

But occasionally, a certain kind of sports hack gets restless.

He starts to believe that because he can arrange words in a particular order, he is not merely a columnist, but a public intellectual.

A thinker.

A man with things to say not only about football, but about society, democracy, government and the state of the nation itself.

That is how you end up with Bill Leckie writing about politics. Oh yes. That’s not a joke, although it definitely should be. That is how you end up with a column so ludicrous that it reads like parody, except sadly for all of us, he appears to mean every word of it.

Someone sent me this for my morning read. I was gobsmacked.

Leckie’s central idea, if we can use that term, is that ballot papers should have no names and no party colours on them.

Instead, apparently, we should get photographs of the candidates in plain white T-shirts, which would somehow force them to “make themselves known” and earn our votes the old-fashioned way, by trudging the streets, shaking hands, and making themselves familiar to us.

This is not political reform. It is speed-dating at the ballot box.

It is the kind of idea only a man who has spent far too long poring over online profiles could come up with. “Lonely girl seeks self-opinionated twat.” That sort of thing.

What exactly are voters supposed to be doing here? Choosing the one with the most reassuring smile? The best haircut? The least unsettling expression in a badly lit campaign photograph?

Leckie actually writes as though “likeability and trust” based on this kind of familiarity would be a better guide than names, party labels, ideology, policies, record or governing intention.

In other words, he thinks democracy would be improved by giving voters less information.

You would have to work quite hard to come up with a dumber idea.

Party colours and names are not decorative extras.

They are not there to brighten up the ballot paper and help the weak-minded.

These things exist because they tell voters something essential. They tell us the broad political outlook, the values, the policy framework, the likely alliances and the governing direction of the people standing under those banners.

Remove that and what exactly are you left with?

A mystery contestant who once visited the local café and smiled at a dog.

And that, of course, is the truly funny part.

Leckie seems to believe he has identified some missing ingredient in modern politics, some great absence of biographical detail and local familiarity.

But politicians’ websites are already rammed with that guff.

I should know; I’ve written biographical info for some of those sites.

And it’s not just those which appear on the Westminster biographies and in the campaign literature itself.

Most pols now have their own personal sites. They keep online diaries. They are forever informing the voters of the minutiae of their lives.

Those sites are absolutely full of it. They tell you about the children, the dog, the hobbies, the hill-walking, the local roots, the community spirit, the love of the area, the handshakes in the high street, the visits to libraries, businesses and school fêtes.

Modern politics is drowning in biography as branding.

It’s not that we are short of this stuff. We are suffocating under it.

So, when Leckie demands more of it, he is not asking for substance. He is asking for more packaging.

He is asking that the most brazen politicians, those who can fake sincerity without possessing an iota of it, have even greater opportunities to bamboozle the hard of thinking.

In the process, because he doesn’t know this stuff is already out there, he’s showing how little he knows about the subject he has wandered into without the least shred of actual thought, like the proverbial clown walking over a minefield.

He suggests the use of a “none of the above” box as though he were Moses bringing the stone tablets down from the mountain.

That idea is as old as political campaigning itself.

He’s seen Brewster’s Millions though and thinks maybe we’ve forgotten the central concept.

He also writes, in one especially – but unintentionally funny – moment that people think he is joking about all of these barmy proposals but that he is deadly serious. This was one of those moments where I laughed out loud.

People are not laughing because they think you are joking, Bill. They are laughing because they know you are serious and they recognise how stupid that makes you. The pub bore with a newspaper column.

The seriousness is not the saving grace. It is, in fact, the punchline.

There is a broader truth here which applies not only to Leckie, but to a depressing amount of commentary in modern Britain.

Most bad ideas are sincerely held.

That is what makes them bad ideas and not just failed jokes. The people advancing them are usually not winking. They believe they have something profound to say. They confuse intensity with intelligence.

Listen to James O’Brien’s LBC show. You will be amazed at how many such people are walking about out there.

They are, thankfully, not all working at national newspapers, although some of them are. A Telegraph headline from this weekend reads: “Killer seals have started eating dolphins. Swimmers fear they are next.”

This is the world we live in now.

Leckie’s column has that in abundance.

It has the booming voice, the theatrical frustration, the self-regard of a man convinced he is exposing the rotten system. But scratch the surface and there is nothing underneath except pub-talk dressed up as constitutional reform.

His comparison of government to business is another example.

He wants Key Performance Indicators in politics, because apparently he thinks government should run like a quarterly sales meeting.

This kind of argument sounds clever only to people who have never really thought about politics.

Governments are not businesses. Citizens are not shareholders. Public life cannot be reduced to the kind of managerial nonsense middle-ranking executives use to justify PowerPoint presentations and office jargon.

Then there is the cheap little aside about “22 genders” represented in parliament, which tells you everything you need to know about the tone and instincts behind the piece and exposes Leckie’s best-known defect: his narrow bigotry.

It contributes nothing else.

It is just lazy, sneering garnish, tossed in to reassure a certain kind of reader that the writer is still on side in the culture war. That is the whole column, really. Loud decorative half-thought. The performance of seriousness without the burden of actually being serious.

And that is why this is so funny.

Because once you strip away the noise, what Leckie has really written is a column arguing that we should choose politicians the way people browse social profiles. No labels, no affiliations, no ideological cues, just a photo, a few lifestyle details, and a general sense that they seem nice enough to trust with the future of the country.

The oft-stated wisdom about writing is that you should “write what you know.” A man paid to write about football and who cannot sensibly write about that, has at a time of war and social upheaval, branched out into politics and his editors let him.

Just what the world needs. In doing so he has come up with stuff so stupid Reform wouldn’t even entertain the ideas.

Which, when you think about it, is almost impressive.

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