Glenn Gibbons: Whyte’s BBC ban displays lack of astute leadership

THE myriad implications of BBC Scotland’s investigative documentary on Rangers owner Craig Whyte the other night began to produce serious repercussions almost before the end credits had stopped rolling.

The most striking of these would be reports that the lead character in the drama had instructed his lawyers to take legal action against the corporation.

This reaction would not be received in any quarter as a shock, since the programme had alleged that Whyte could have gone to prison as a consequence of behaviour in his business career that amounted to a criminal offence. Even so, the haste with which he counter-attacked seemed to be merely the latest example of a tendency towards impulsive, potentially ill-considered hostility.

Whyte, it will be remembered, had already withdrawn “all co-operation” with the BBC even before the programme had been aired, citing “repeated difficulties” over the latter’s coverage, and accusing the station of bias against Rangers.

To anyone with even a superficial knowledge of how the communications media operate, that charge would appear absurd, almost infantile in its naivete. Whyte’s own well-documented protectiveness of his privacy, with its undertone of secretiveness, would be enough to make him an irresistible subject for any story-hungry editorial team.

But, more worryingly for those looking for signs of dynamic and astute management at Ibrox, the banning order clearly took no account of the probability that it would breach the BBC’s contract with the Scottish Premier League as a rights holder, with entitlement to full access to all media activities at the club

If and when the television people invoke that right and the prohibition is, inevitably, repealed, it will result in an embarrassment for Whyte and his board that should have been obvious and avoidable. The episode suggests that, whatever benefits or otherwise the Whyte administration may have to offer Rangers, they are a long way from efficiency in the matter of managing publicity.

If that sounds like a triviality compared to Rangers’ overall concerns, it has been shown to be important because nothing that has occurred in recent times has done anything to dispel the uncertainty that has settled on the club since Whyte’s accession. Instead of taking a firm, perhaps even aggressive, pro-active stance on a number of issues, the Rangers owner and his team have been consistently sluggish in anticipating problems and taking pre-emptive action. The result is an impression of mainly unconvincing attempts to undo damage.

Even a relatively unimportant (and certainly unsurprising) development such as the departures of former chairman John McClelland and iconic figure John Greig were badly handled, with Whyte actually admitting that he had no idea the two men were unsettled and felt marginalised.

His denial that Greig, specifically, had been removed from the decision-making process in the boardroom sounded ludicrously implausible, having been made a full day after the former player, manager and director had given his “exclusion from the corporate governance of the club” as his reason for resigning.

Whyte’s habitual discomfort with the various arms of the media may partly explain some of his poor performances in that regard, but nothing he has said in public – despite the occasional banner headline proclaiming a “revealing honesty” in forthcoming interviews – has lifted the widespread unease over Rangers’ financial health in his care.

Court action by a firm of lawyers to recover a £35,000 bill for legal fees and the ring-fencing of £3 million of the club’s money as insurance against upcoming claims by HMRC and former directors Martin Bain and Donald McIntyre have simply reinforced the impression of extremely limited resources.

With regard to media manipulation, Whyte could take lessons from his predecessor, David Murray, whose control of most of the personnel in the mass-circulation red tops was so complete that he did not even have to conceal the economic devastation his policies were inflicting on Rangers.

Evidence of the damage was obvious enough to make the detached observer’s eyes water, but Murray was assured that his every claim – however contradictory it may have appeared when set beside the club’s annual returns – would be accepted by his media poodles without question or demur. Whyte’s seeming pre-occupation with privacy, on the other hand, has already led to the discomfiting likelihood that his utterances will be met with a certain scepticism.