Peter Lawwell can’t wash his hands of the mess Celtic are in.

It has been a busy couple of days, and one of the stories that got away from me was one that appeared across the Celtic fan media sites.

It tracks back to a claim Keith Jackson made in one of his increasingly deranged paywalled columns. In it, he made the risible claim that Peter Lawwell was opposed to the Kyogo sale and opposed to the decision to sell him without replacing him.

I love this story. It is a perfect one for us to get our teeth into.

Mostly, that is because it is just one of a growing number of stories about Lawwell, all painting him in the best possible light.

It is all meant to soften the image.

So, he was opposed to the sale of Kyogo. Brilliant.

As though he did not sit on the board that took that decision.

As though he did not occupy a senior executive role and was not someone who always had the ear of the man across the water and could, had he really been dead against it, have picked up the phone and tried to stop it.

Yesterday we got the resignation of Tom Allison.

Hopefully, we will soon get a few more. The more the merrier. The more this board is gutted out, the better. Because there is something these people still do not seem to understand. So perhaps it is time to spell it out as clearly as possible, so nobody can pretend to misunderstand where some of us stand on this.

If you serve on that board, you are bound by collective responsibility.

That is a neat little phrase borrowed mainly from politics. It applies when you sit inside an executive body that takes a decision, especially one that may prove unpopular or controversial. Once that decision is made, everyone walks point with it. It does not matter what your private view was. It does not matter if you hated every part of it. You still go out and sell it as though you believe in it.

In many ways, collective responsibility is a moral choice.

The people who bind themselves to it do so because they put the leadership and the policy ahead of their own convictions. Very often, they do it to protect their own careers, their own access, or their own place inside the room. Other people refuse.

Some resign rather than stand there and defend something they believe is fundamentally wrong. They will not pretend to support what they know is indefensible.

You only have to look at Donald Trump’s cabinet in the United States right now to understand that point.

There are people there who know the Iran decision was insanity. They know the war is a mess. They know there are no easy exits. These people also know the commander-in-chief is as crazy as a shithouse rat. Yet they stay. They stand at podiums and defend what they know cannot be defended. That is collective responsibility. Some people will not compromise themselves like that. Others simply do not care.

During the summer, when Brendan Rodgers was standing in front of the media every other day and being asked about the signings everyone expected to be made, every board member at Celtic faced a very simple choice.

Support the policy or go public and support the manager.

The gaps in the team were obvious. The need for reinforcements was obvious. That became even clearer after we sold Kühn and then sold Idah, having already sold Kyogo. Every single person on that board had to decide whether to support a policy of deliberately depriving the manager, the club and the supporters of what was needed to get the job done, or to walk away and make their objection public.

None of them did it. Not one.

If there was opposition to that policy, we did not hear it.

Collective responsibility or collective cowardice. I do not care which phrase people prefer. Every one of them is culpable. Every one of them had a responsibility then, and every one of them carries responsibility now for what followed.

When Rodgers came under attack in the media, they had another chance to speak out. Again, nobody did. The moment you choose silence and acquiescence over a moral stand, you dip your hands in the blood alongside the assassins. I make no distinction between the people who enabled it and the people who willed the act.

Likewise, nobody resigned over the deranged attack launched on Rodgers by the man who now calls himself the principal shareholder.

That was not just a matter of professionalism or morality. It was a matter of Celtic’s reputation. That man damaged our reputation by sticking knives into a manager who had brought nothing but success and still had another year in which to deliver more. If there was ever a moment to speak out, that was it.

Nobody did.

Collective responsibility or collective cowardice? I do not care. Failing to speak up gave tacit approval to that message and to every consequence that flowed from it. Not one of them emerges from that with a shred of credibility when they claim to have acted in the best interests of Celtic.

Nobody gets to burnish a reputation after this. Nobody gets to polish a halo and pretend they were the lone voice of reason. History will not care about your attempted rewrite, and neither will the rest of us.

You do not get to deprive a Celtic manager of the tools he needs to do his job and then assassinate his character because he asks in public for those tools.

You do not get to sit on a board that tarnished the reputation of this club in the way it responded when he resigned and then imagine that anything you say now will mitigate what you allowed to happen, assuming you were not one of the people responsible in the first place. If you really were the sole voice of opposition, it is far too late to tell us now.

I do not believe that story. It’s absurd to ask us to believe that the man who was one of the most powerful figures in the club, and whose whole time as chief executive revolved around maximising value, objected to cashing a £10 million cheque.

I do not believe that the man many people think loathed Brendan Rodgers was somehow his final line of defence.

There are no alibis. There are no excuses.

If you sat round that table, every decision taken at that table sits on your head because nobody forced you to remain there.

Collective responsibility only works for people willing to bind themselves to those decisions. Once you bind yourself to them, you do not get to advertise yourself later as the voice of sanity or reason. The time for that has passed. The time for that was when you could still speak out and perhaps change the outcome.

Do I believe the story itself? No. Of course I do not. It is ludicrous.

But the truth at the centre of this is that I do not care whether it is true or not, because it does not absolve him either way. Collective responsibility means collective blame. It means a collective verdict from history.

It means you walk point with the guilty whatever your own views, whatever your own status, whatever private objections you may now claim to have had. I could not care less whether that feels fair. It is as much a part of the firmament as the laws of physics.

The decision hung the manager out to dry. The failure to replace key players, whether caused by arrogance, ego, spite or something else, has had profound consequences. We may not even have seen the end of those consequences yet.

At this point, I do not care who voiced displeasure in private. Not one of them resigned over it. Not one of them took responsibility for the chaos that followed. And in the absence of accountability, there are no clean hands.

They can all walk point straight to hell.

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