Honourable Men
In the Shakespeare play ‘Julius Cesar’ Brutus
and his friends have murdered Cesar in the Senate and worry about how
the mob will respond to their deed. They allow Cesar’s friend Marc Antony to address
the mob in Rome on the explicit understanding that he doesn’t blame Brutus and
his cronies. Marc Antony skilfully points out the wounds on Cesar’s body before
praising Brutus and his co-conspirators as ‘honourable
men’ but doing so with such dripping sarcasm that the mob becomes enraged.
The final blow is the reading of Cesar’s will to the crowd who hear of his love
for them and what he bequeaths the city. As the mob begin to riot, Marc Antony,
happy that revenge might soon be his, mutters to himself…"Now let it work. Mischief, thou
art afoot. Take thou what course thou wilt." As a work of rhetoric,
Marc Antony’s speech is a great example of saying one thing and meaning the
opposite. The ‘honourable men’ are
clearly exposed to the mob as self-serving assassins.
Strange that
the words of Shakespeare came to me today, perhaps it was due to the decision
of those honourable men at the SFA to
pass Dave King as a fit and proper person. Yes he was on the board of the old
club which suffered an insolvency event and died leaving millions owed to
creditors large and small but the SFA are honourable men. They may argue the
legalities of such decisions but the moral issue is clear: If we are saying
that a man convicted of crimes of dishonesty is a fit and proper person to run a
Scottish football club, then who exactly is unfit? Mr King came to the
attention of the South African Tax Authorities when he bought a painting for R1.7m
at a time his declared income was R60,000. Yes he was convicted of 41 counts of
breaching the South African tax code and ordered to spend 2 years in prison for
each offence or pay over £40m in fines. Yes, the Judge called him a ‘glib and shameless liar’ but such things
were viewed as no barrier to him running the new Rangers by the SFA and they
are, of course, all honourable men. They will find legalese words to give a fig
leaf of respectability to their decision which is, in the eyes of many outside
the Rangers bubble, just another example of
the SFA bending over backwards to help the reborn establishment club
back onto its feet after the shameful demise of the oldco.
Their chums
in the media will trot out the ‘good for
Scottish Football’ guff till the gullible swallow it like a nice piece of
succulent lamb. But they too are all honourable men, aren’t they? They will also trot out the inarticulate and those
of jumbled mind on radio phone in shows and let the cynics of the media attack
them as obsessed or paranoid. Alas they are too late because we all know how it
works now. We all see the manipulation, the calling in of favours and yes the
agendas. We’ve seen it in politics and we see it again as sections of the media
attempt to resurrect the corpse of old Rangers and stick it back on the throne.
The SFA themselves
stated on their website…
‘’Mr King provided substantial information in relation to
the matters set out at Article 10.2 (h) and 10.2 (j) namely: He has been
convicted within the last 10 years of (i) an offence liable to imprisonment of
two years or over, (ii) corruption or (iii) fraud and; He has been “a director of a club in
membership of any National Association within the 5-year period preceding such
club having undergone an insolvency event”.
Despite this they still feel he is a fit and
proper person to run a football club. Of course we trust them, they are all
honourable men, aren’t they?
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