Glenn Gibbons: Green must think we are yokels

CHARLES Green, the cartoon Yorkshireman whose deepest pleasure seems to derive from revelling in his own, tell-it-like-it-is “honest”, also appears to have been afflicted by a condition not uncommon among natives of that peculiar county.

That is, a crass inability to tell the difference between blunt speaking and rudeness.

Like Brian Clough, Geoffrey Boycott, Fred Trueman and other well-known boors from the region, the Rangers chief executive is at risk of simultaneously offending everyone in sight and of tumbling into parody every time he exercises his tongue. This certainly gives him a veneer of ridiculousness, but beneath the clownishness there are implications which should cause the Ibrox club’s followers a certain concern.

When Green had to apologise for insulting Aston Villa recently, the most significant element of his outburst was not that he called the Birmingham club “useless” (hence the grovelling), but that he should, quite without compunction, underline the point he was trying to make by introducing a “fact” that was a complete fabrication.

Trying to talk up Rangers’ entitlement to a place among the biggest clubs on the planet, Green said, “Why should Manchester United get £320 million (in annual revenues, much from TV) and Aston Villa, who are useless, get £250 million?”

The figure attached to Villa was plucked from the ether, and bore no relation whatsoever to the £90m+ that was lodged as their revenue in the club’s latest financial returns. What should be at least slightly disturbing for anyone with a chance of coming within Green’s field of influence is that he should quite unhesitatingly invent a figure he must have known could be exposed as a blatant lie literally within a few seconds.

This readiness to dive headlong into near-certain condemnation as a glib charlatan suggests two things, neither of which could be considered commendable. The first is that he simply doesn’t care, an insouciance stemming from the belief that he will be able to talk his way out of any potential embarrassment.

The second, however, is much darker and should be considerably more discomforting for anyone likely to invest either faith or money in the chief executive’s plans for Rangers’ revival. It is that he is a firm adherent to PT Barnum’s most famous dictum: “There’s a sucker born every minute”.

The evidence so far makes it difficult to resist the notion that Green arrived in Glasgow with the conviction that anywhere north of Leeds is a backwater populated by yokels who would be susceptible to the famous mushroom system of cultivation (“keep them in the dark and feed them a load of manure”).

How else would anyone explain not only the aforementioned Aston Villa nonsense, but this week’s staggering public somersault over his claim to have received death threats from rather feverish Rangers fans in the wake of his taking control of the club? Unusually, Green supported his reporting of the abuse with the entirely credible revelation that he had been forced to move house almost on a weekly basis in order to avoid the possibility of GBH or worse.

The instant he learned, however, that Rangers supporters were “upset” by his claims, he rushed to the club’s website to reassure his former tormentors that they are, indeed, the world’s greatest fans and that he merely reported the threats as a way of demonstrating how far “we (meaning, presumably, this band of brothers) have come together.”

As a form of monumental audacity, the expectation that this explanation would have been accepted without question by anyone with an IQ in double figures may even have topped the absurdity of the Villa affair. It is also as despicable an insult to the national intelligence as it is possible to imagine.

In a fertile period for commentators, Green’s risible antics were accompanied by the reappearance on stage of his predecessor, Craig Whyte, the latter promising a future of intriguing developments by implicating Rangers’ administrators, Duff and Phelps, in dubious practices.

These allegations will surely be settled in law, but, in the meantime, Whyte took the initiative in the matter of claim and counter-claim by producing evidence that included recorded conversations with a senior executive in D&P who has consistently denied all allegations of impropriety.

If this episode proved anything, it was that, whatever else may be said of Whyte, he is no fool. Time may show that those who thought he was made the biggest mistake of all.