It's Not a Scandal If We Don't Report It

It was supposed to be a safe house.  It was supposed to be somewhere Scottish journalists could hide out whenever something so awful happened that involved Celtic that we couldn't possibly ignore it.  It was supposed to be a place where we could shelter and wait out the storm so that when we emerged, we could put our hands on our hearts and say in all honesty that Lawwell hadn't got to us and that we hadn't buried a story because of pressure put on us by certain powers.  We were only there an hour when the door blew open in an explosion of fire and splinters, taking out the boys from the Daily Express (nobody'd miss them) and standing in the smoke holding a mortar at his hip was Lawwell himself.  "Didn't anyone tell you morons that nowhere is safe from me?" he said, striding in and taking a boot at Gerry Braiden's neck.

 

"Right, here's the deal: something big is approaching and I want some damage limitation from you lot and when I say damage limitation, of course I mean you dig up some old story about Rangers and rant about that until our own little problem goes away."

"By our own little problem, do you mean the boys who are locked up under armed guard in Helen Street right now?" chirped up some new kid at the back.  Lawwell looked around the room to see who had spoken, reached into his satchel and pulled out a mortar shell and threw it straight at the kid's face.  It bounced off his nose and landed among the lads from BBC Scotland who scrambled to get out of the way in case it went off.

"Who the fuck sent you a memo saying you could ask me questions?  Spiers," and he gave me a kick.  "You've been demonising Rangers long enough now to know exactly what to do, get on with it and make it a good one - I don't want any of that sash patterned grass pish or green Pepperami shite; I want something big, something controversial, preferably with Nazis, I like Nazis.  In the meantime, I have a prison visit to make - if I've told the Green Brigade once, I've told them a thousand times - if anyone's bringing down Ibrox, it's going to be me!"

 

And that's how a three year old photograph of a couple of soldiers posing in front of a Union Flag in the desert came to knock a story about Irish Republican terrorists being arrested in Scotland off the front pages of every newspaper in the land.  Not that I paid much attention to it, I merely gave the youngsters their instructions on how to do it and set them loose.  No, I had other fish to fry and so Monday found me mooching over to Hampden to give Stewart Regan a refresher course on how to wind up the Huns on Twitter.  He took to it like he'd never been away and it wasn't long before he was being followed by hundreds of Rangers supporters so I showed him how to block them, then once the Celtic fans got wind of his return and they started following him in their thousands, I reminded him how to favourite their obsessed and demented ramblings - sometimes he would even retweet them!  Job done, I was on my way downstairs when Darryl Broadfoot cornered me and asked how I was getting on spreading the word about Dave King.  "What on earth are you on about, Darryl?"

"Oh don't play cute with me, Spiers, you know exactly what I'm on about.  Just because Tom English is heading up the Pre-Emptive Task Force on Dave King doesn't mean you should take the huff.  Just suck it up and get on with it, it's your forte after all.  Stewart's already decided with no supporting evidence and no reason bar one, that King's getting nowhere near a fit and proper person approval and we assembled the Task Force to get the message out there in advance so that it comes as no surprise and seems perfectly sensible once we announce it."

"So what's the one reason?" I asked.

"We fucking hate Rangers, that's the only reason you need to worry about chummy."