Celtic have forgotten that you must adapt to stay strong.

Let’s talk for a minute about power, and more specifically about how organisations maintain it.

One of the biggest problems I have with the current Celtic board is that it appears to believe it has nothing left to learn.

It is static. It is rooted firmly in one mode of thinking, and that is not how power is maintained. I am not going to go through the maintainers-versus-builders analogy all over again. But there is one part of it which matters here.

Power is best exercised through change.

Great powers decline when they become arrogant, complacent and increasingly obsessed with themselves. They stop looking outward. They stop asking what rivals are doing. They stop adapting because they convince themselves that the methods which made them successful will continue working indefinitely.

That is almost never true. Reacting to what everyone else is doing is critical not just to maintaining your strength, but to growing it.

I tell people that I grew up with two great loves: the Labour and trade union movement, and Celtic. My teenage years were not particularly enjoyable in either case.

We lived through successive Tory governments which battered the trade union movement, whilst across Glasgow the Ibrox club was hoovering up trophies during its nine-in-a-row years.

We now understand far more about the financial model which underpinned that period. It was not the EBT era, but Rangers under David Murray embraced enormous ambition backed heavily by debt and external financing.

That model ultimately proved unsustainable, even if supporters enjoying the trophies at the time had little reason to think about where it might eventually lead.

Back then, none of us knew how either story would eventually unfold. We did not know that the Tory Party would eventually suffer an electoral collapse which would keep it out of government for years. We did not know Rangers would eventually discover that the financial taps did not run forever.

Those two organisations dealt with power in very different ways. What happened at Ibrox was ultimately a story of hubris and over-expansion. Finite resources were treated as though they were infinite. The assumption seemed to be that there would always be another cheque, another credit line, another means of keeping the whole machine moving.

The Conservative Party of my youth understood power differently. Whatever you thought of them politically, and believe me, I thought plenty, they understood how to get power, how to wield it and, crucially, how to keep it. They did that by constantly evolving.

For decades they were one of the most formidable electoral machines in democratic politics because they had a ruthless ability to recognise when one generation or one political era had run its course. Margaret Thatcher was not the only Tory leader ever dispatched by her own side, but she remains the brutal example.

She dominated British politics throughout my teenage years. I remember her fall vividly and remember what it felt like to see that towering, totemic figure finally brought down. Like plenty of people on the Labour side, I thought it represented an enormous opportunity. I could not imagine a Conservative Party without Thatcher commanding the same authority.

Then came John Major. Then came the 1992 general election, and then came one of the most astonishing election results of my lifetime. Thatcher had won three general elections, but by November 1990 her own party had reached the conclusion that her time was ending. Michael Heseltine challenged her, she failed to clear the required threshold on the first ballot and withdrew, and John Major ultimately succeeded her.

Major then won the 1992 election.

Whatever else followed, nobody could reasonably argue that removing Thatcher had automatically destroyed the Tory electoral machine. The party had looked at perhaps the most successful election winner it had ever possessed and concluded that yesterday’s strength could become tomorrow’s weakness.

That takes ruthlessness. Her removal was about personalities, Europe and internal warfare as well as electoral calculation. But the broader institutional instinct mattered. The organisation was capable of looking at something which had once made it extraordinarily successful and deciding that it could no longer be treated as untouchable.

Even as a traumatised Labourite and socialist, you had to admire the bastards for being capable of doing it.

Powerful organisations do not survive by defending every idea which once made them powerful. They survive by knowing which ideas to abandon.

Celtic seem to have forgotten that.

We have had directors around this club for decades. Dermot Desmond’s influence has grown enormously over that period. Brian Wilson and others associated with the same broad conservative culture have been around Celtic for years.

That institutional continuity has become institutional stagnation. We have lost the ability to imagine a different future because the people running Celtic appear increasingly convinced that the present structure represents the natural order of things.

The appointments change, but the mentality does not. Michael Nicholson comes in. Chris McKay becomes more prominent. Chairmen change.

But the organisation keeps reproducing itself. The same assumptions. The same caution. The same instinct for maintaining rather than transforming.

Worse than that, this board appears to look at its record and conclude that there is nothing left for anybody else to teach it. That is one of the most dangerous conclusions any powerful institution can reach.

The Tory Party, for most of its modern history, understood that political survival required adaptation. Even Boris Johnson’s rise was more complicated than simply being a straightforward move to the right.

Tim Shipman produced one of the great descriptions of that period when he wrote that Johnson “squats like a giant toad across British politics” and had expanded the Overton window “in both directions.”

It is a fantastic description because it captures the contradiction. Johnson combined hard-line positions on some cultural and immigration questions with policies on spending, infrastructure and state intervention which departed significantly from the small-state rhetoric traditionally associated with Conservative governments.

That contradiction did not trouble the party because ideological purity was never its only objective. Power mattered. If an idea worked, they would take it. If the political landscape changed, they would change with it.

The Tory modernisation project borrowed heavily from the methods which had made New Labour successful. Parties steal each other’s language, tactics and ideas all the time because successful political organisations are constantly looking beyond their own walls.

Then even Johnson himself became expendable. By 2022, Conservative MPs had increasingly come to regard him as an electoral liability. After surviving a confidence vote in June, his position finally collapsed amid ministerial resignations the following month, and he announced that he would step down as party leader.

Nothing lasts forever. That is the lesson.

There is an entire football world out there filled with ideas Celtic could be studying. Different recruitment structures, different coaching methods, different academy systems, different commercial models, different uses of analytics, different approaches to sports science, different ways of structuring football departments and different ways of exploiting data, international networks and emerging markets.

There is almost an infinite amount we could learn. But we have stopped looking.

We have stopped trying to expand because Celtic are run by people who appear to believe the world has nothing left to teach them.

They are the dominant force in Scottish football. There is money in the bank. The club has regularly posted profits, signed players and won trophies.

So, the people responsible look around this small pond, see that Celtic remain the biggest fish in it and conclude that this must be the natural ceiling of our ambition. Without the ability to conceive of something greater, they inevitably begin to believe this is as far as Celtic can go.

That is not how power works, and it is certainly not how power lasts.

I think often about 2012 and about something which happened the year before, something inside Celtic rather than at Ibrox or Hampden.

John Reid left the chairman’s office.

Reid had taken over in 2007 and stood down in 2011, with Ian Bankier succeeding him. Whatever anyone thinks of Reid politically, and there are plenty of reasons Celtic supporters had serious disagreements with him, I regard him as the only genuinely transformational Celtic chairman of my lifetime apart from Fergus McCann.

Because Reid understood power. He wanted Celtic to assert itself.

By then we already had the biggest stadium in the country. We were financially transformed. We had experienced major European nights and domestic success. The assumptions which had once placed the Ibrox club permanently above Celtic in Scottish football had already been demolished.

Reid was prepared to say it out loud. His famous declaration that Celtic would no longer sit at the back of the bus captured that mentality perfectly. It was not timid corporate language. It was an assertion that Celtic was not prepared to accept marginalisation or behave like a smaller institution than it actually was.

That was transformational. It said that the old order was finished. It said that Celtic understood its strength. Most importantly, it said that Celtic was prepared to use it.

Then Reid left and he was replaced by Ian Bankier, another chairman from a much more conservative corporate tradition.

I have always believed that what happened in Scottish football the following year would have played out very differently had John Reid still occupied that chair.

I believe Celtic would have pursued every available avenue of influence. I believe Reid would have fought ferociously over sporting consequences. And I have always believed that the argument over the Ibrox club’s historical honours would have been pursued with far greater aggression under his chairmanship.

Celtic have never possessed that same institutional aggression since. We have never again had a chairman who appeared so determined to assert Celtic’s power and insist upon the strongest possible version of this football club.

Reid himself was an extraordinary political contradiction: a man whose views evolved enormously across his life, who moved through some of the highest offices in British government before later becoming Celtic chairman.

In other words, he understood something our current leadership increasingly seems incapable of understanding.

You change. You learn. You adapt. You take ideas from wherever you find them. You recognise when yesterday’s solution has become today’s problem. And if circumstances demand that you abandon something which once made you successful, you do it.

Because power is not something you win once and possess forever. Power has to be renewed. It has to be defended. It has to be exercised.

Most of all, it has to be earned again and again.

Celtic’s current leadership behaves as though the club’s dominance proves the correctness of everything it has done. I believe the opposite lesson should be drawn.

The stronger you are, the more urgently you should ask what comes next. The more successful you become, the harder you should look for the weakness which could eventually bring that success to an end. The bigger the lead you possess, the more ruthlessly you should work to increase it.

John Reid understood that. Fergus McCann certainly understood it. I am no longer convinced that the people running Celtic today do, and I doubt that they ever will.

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