If McCoist stops telling lies about Celtic, we’ll stop telling the truth about him.

It seems I upset a few people recently. Well, one person in particular. Ally McCoist, who apparently objects to being called a deranged anti-Celtic conspiracy theorist. To those outlets quoting this blog for having said that, I have only one thing to say in response. If he stops telling lies about Celtic, we will stop telling the truth about him.

Frankly, if you are going to behave like a deranged anti-Celtic conspiracy theorist, then this blog is going to call you that.

If you have a long history of behaving like a deranged anti-Celtic conspiracy theorist, then that is the treatment you should expect from now until the sound of the Rapture. I am sick and tired of this guy hiding behind a cheeky-chappy persona which everyone in Scottish football who has had to deal with him knows is false.

Recently on the podcast, not last night’s but last week’s, I talked about Stephen King’s excellent novel The Outsider.

It is one of his best modern books.

It is about a murder and the aftermath of that murder.

The accused is a man called Terry Maitland. Although there is fingerprint and DNA evidence on the body, and in the truck he allegedly drove, and there is video footage and eyewitness testimony linking him to the crime, he also offers an alibi which proves ironclad. There is eyewitness testimony, video footage and fingerprint evidence putting him seventy miles away from where he allegedly committed the killing.

One of the theories explored in the book is that of the doppelgänger.

It is a very cool concept. The idea is that every single person has, somewhere on the face of the earth, an identical double. Not a twin, not a biological double, but someone whose physical characteristics are a perfect match to their own.

It sometimes feels as though there are two Ally McCoist’s.

Although the theme of the book is that one person cannot be in two different places at the same time, the two McCoist’s are frequently in the same place at the same time. It is just that one of them remains just out of sight while the other is in the spotlight.

But I never forget that there are two Ally McCoist’s. No Celtic fan ever forgets that. That is why little outbursts like the one he made the other day do not surprise me.

I think he was expecting a howl of outrage from Hearts. I think he expected another howl of outrage from Ibrox.

You know what? I think he expected some people in the mainstream media to stand by him.

In the end, only Ewan Cameron actually did.

The Ally McCoist who went on talkSPORT in the aftermath of that and made the ranting claim that Celtic runs Scottish football because the fixture list was not to his liking is the same one who has constantly railed against the rule book whenever it does not favour his preferred club.

The other Ally McCoist is the one who pretends to be an everyman, an upstanding member of the football community without any of the baggage the other one carries so proudly around with him.

That Ally McCoist has a lot of friends in the game who do not always realise who they are talking to.

But the other Ally McCoist is the one who, when Scottish Hate Crime legislation was passed, railed against that too and said that if it had been enforced at Ibrox that night, he would have been one of the ones arrested.

That is as clear a confession as you are ever going to get that this guy has in him all the poison necessary to trigger that arrest.

It still amazes me that when this Ally McCoist pops up and makes himself visible, no one ever seems to ask whether the McCoist they get is the fake.

But we know which one is real. We have had much longer exposure to him.

We have lived in proximity to what he tracks back to.

So, we are never in any doubt about which version we are watching at any given time. We know the difference between the fake and the real thing. We know the difference between the act and the man.

He has tried to laugh this off. When you are made to look ridiculous, as he has been here, it is often easiest to pretend you were joking.

A certain other figure, much more visible on the world stage, does this all the time.

Donald Trump was at it again this week.

He posted an image of himself as Jesus Christ healing a sick man who looked an awful lot like Jeffrey Epstein.

When called out on the obvious blasphemy, in the same week he decided to pick a fight with the Pope, he did what he always does and tried to explain it away as something else. He claimed the picture was not depicting him as Jesus at all.

He said it was depicting him as a doctor healing the sick. It was a claim so risible that almost everyone within earshot laughed.

Trump has often claimed to be joking when he has said outrageous and dangerous things. When he spoke about a mass pardoning at the end of his term of office, he was called out on it. He made the claim that he was not being serious; we all know better.

McCoist, to his credit, usually sticks to his guns when he says outrageous and even dangerous things. He very often leaves them on the record. He rarely withdraws the statements.

When he sat waving blank sheets of paper and claimed to have the names of a secret SFA committee punishing his club, those actions had profound consequences for one club, Raith Rovers. But he never withdrew the claim.

His central claim here is that Celtic runs Scottish football. Has he withdrawn it?

Of course not.

It’s not the first time he’s said that and he very definitely believes it.

He says Celtic sites are always criticising him. That is because he gives us reason to do it over and over again. Other people in his business manage to maintain some sense of professionalism. It is only the ones who do not who get called out for it consistently.

But with McCoist this goes much deeper. For some people, he wears the mask very well. For us, he does not bother wearing it at all. That, in some ways, is a backhanded compliment. Who knows better than we do that it’s exactly what it is?

I often wonder what some of those people who do take the mask at face value would say if they could see him the way we do. On occasion they must. I would like to know how they reconcile that with the man they think they know.

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