Last night, the Union Brats sprung their “Cunning Plan”. Of course, it was hilarious.

By now, you would think the Ibrox club would have complied with all of Celtic’s requests about who attends the game at the coming weekend. The Union Brats clearly intend to show up in their standard garb, and at that point it will be up to Police Scotland, Celtic stewards and everyone else involved to decide what to do about it.

They intend to camouflage themselves, not by wearing normal everyday clothes, but by asking the fans around them to dress as they do.

After last night, I suggest that they all just wear clown suits and have done with it.

Because their little stunt at Tynecastle was one of the most unintentionally hilarious things I think I’ve ever seen.

The fact that they thought something so obvious had not already been thought of by every other person in the country, and trying to send the message to fellow supporters in secret, is moronic, if we’re being generous.

There are a lot of ways these days to send secret messages.

There are at least two Ibrox fan forums with closed-off sections for members only, where they could have posted such a request. There are WhatsApp groups. There are Facebook groups. There are supporter organisations. They could have got the word out quietly in any number of ways.

Instead, the Union Brats decided to send a message via a secret banner at a packed football stadium, where TV cameras were everywhere, broadcasting their intent to the thousands present and now, thanks to a few pictures, to everyone else as well.

Several things automatically come to mind here. Blackadder’s Baldrick and his cunning plans, which are never particularly cunning or smart. Wile E. Coyote and his series of bizarre efforts, using a variety of absurd devices to catch the Road Runner. The building of the invincible, indestructible Death Star, except for that one open vent where, if you fire a missile in just the right place, it will blow the whole thing to smithereens.

Those are fantastic fictional examples. But for the real classics, you have to go to real life and real history.

Let’s take the Gunpowder Plot as one example. A plot that got so convoluted and had so many people involved in it that you only needed one person to give the whole game away. The anonymous letter warned the authorities about the plot itself. Even then, they might have got away with it, except that when the basement of the House of Lords was searched, they found Guy Fawkes standing there, guarding barrels of gunpowder.

Try talking your way out of that one. Not going to happen, is it?

Or how about the Zimmermann Telegram in 1917? Instead of sending low-level diplomats to Mexico to propose an alliance that threatened the southern United States, in a fashion that would have been both hard to detect and easy to deny, the Germans simply sent their proposal to the Mexican government via a not-so-secret cable. The British intercepted it, decoded it, passed it on to the United States, and it was instrumental in helping bring America into the First World War.

But this one has always been my favourite. On 10 January 1940, German Major Helmuth Reinberger was in a plane flying over Germany with another military officer when the pilot got disoriented in bad weather. The plane crossed into neutral Belgium and crashed. A nothing incident, except for the documents Reinberger happened to be carrying on him: the secret plan to invade Belgium.

I mean, if you wrote that in fiction, it would be rejected as too outrageous. But it actually happened exactly that way. When he stumbled out of the plane, he realised he had to get rid of the documents and tried to burn them.

His cigarette lighter failed. He borrowed a match from a local farmer and started destroying the evidence, but by then it was too late. Belgian police arrived. Some of them were savvy enough to realise what they had in their hands.

It was only after that incident that Hitler decreed to the High Command that officers were no longer to travel with sensitive documents giving away the innermost secrets of the state.

When you see the madness of The Union Brats, you frequently think about things like conspiracy theories and other crazy nonsense they promote on their sites and social media pages. You are right to conclude that they are mad and a little bit out there. But it takes something like this to remind you that, at the root of it all, is the simple fact that many of them are just stupid, lacking even the most basic intelligence.

When I read that story this morning, I tried to imagine the pitch meeting where all The Union Brats got together and decided how they would do this.

Someone must have suggested using online forums. Someone must have suggested the old WhatsApp group. Someone must have suggested that they could do it by Chinese whispers, the old nod and a wink, and rely on other people to spread the word for them.

Then some brain box came up with the idea of the secret banner.

“Let’s take a banner into a packed football stadium, during a live televised match. But aha, here’s the cunning plan: let’s make it so that the message is written on the back and only the supporters looking directly at it can see what it says.”

That is up there with the schemes of Basil Fawlty.

Not surprisingly, the secret is out this morning, which is what tends to happen when you run your little move in front of thousands of people. It only takes one of them to take a picture, which is what happened in this case.

It wasn’t even one of their own supporters.

It was an eagle-eyed Hearts fan who spotted it, snapped it and then shared it everywhere.

Of course, that’s what happened, because this has all the subtlety of a Risk player taking his objective card, which you’re supposed to look at once and then put face down on the table, blowing it up to charity-cheque size and playing the game with it sitting beside him so that everyone can see what his end goals are even as he works through the plan.

They deserve to be mocked without mercy. Because let’s be brutally honest, these are not the Quiz Kids we’re dealing with. None of them is getting into Mensa. The Union Brats are really, really dumb.

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