WP Archives April 12: Useful Idiots

For many years Rangers supporters have labelled Graham Spiers “The Useful Idiot”.

He served his purpose well over the years to the agenda led schemers in the Scottish media, almost always complying with this or that agenda.

His track record of disgraceful comments about Rangers includes disgusting comments about heroes Bill Struth, Davie Cooper and Jock Wallace.

His negative comments about the Rangers support could fill this whole blog. If you are a Rangers fan you will be well aware of his hatred for our club.

Spiers has always given himself extra licence to attack the support by continually reminding his readers or listeners of his Protestant background, or the fact he “used to support Rangers as a kid”. At the weekend on Twitter he claimed to stop supporting the club 25 years ago. 1987 really would have been a strange time for any Rangers supporter to turn his back on the club. After all 1987 was the year that the excitement and investment of the Holmes/Souness revolution resulted in the first league championship for 9 years.

We all know Spiers is not your normal football fan but any supporter from that era knows for sure that Spiers is either a weirdo or a liar, or possibly both.

We are always given the impression that his decision to stop supporting Rangers was a moral decision.
Strangely, when Celtic fans displayed the worst case of racism ever witnessed in Scottish football just months later in january 1988 at Rangers player Mark Walters, it didn’t start a campaign from Spiers against the Celtic support.

Nor when in the early 90s it became apparent that Celtic had covered up 20 years of child abuse at Celtic boys club by Jim Torbett.

Clearly these two issues required the very morality of Celtic Football Club and it’s supporters to be questioned.

That’s not to mention the continual vocal support for the IRA from the supporters of said club.

When Spiers wrote a disparaging article about Davie Cooper on the Saturday before a Rangers v Motherwell cup final known as “The Cooper Cup Final”, it became patently obvious to even the most gullible bear from the era that Spiers had never been a Rangers fan. You’d think therefore that this cosy arrangement whereby Spiers writes in the football section about anything other than the actual game to please his masters would last forever.

Wrong.

While Spiers is still used and abused by the mentally ill Phil O’Gorman, or whatever he is calling himself this week, the schemers know that Spiers just doesn’t have the credibility any more to get the message across to anyone with any intellect. Years and years of errors, laziness and complacency have put paid to that.

So, the agenda schemers from the East have been scouring the planet for another useful idiot, albeit one who appears to have some credibility, and a brass neck that won’t see him made a fool of any time he gets in to debate.

According to blogger David Leggat, the next journo to be approached by a group of activists including Phil Whatshisname and Matt McGlone was veteran BBC journalist Hugh Pym, who politely declined.

I’d have thought Republican Roy Greenslade would fit the bill, but perhaps he would have been too obvious a choice.

So, up stepped Channel 4′s Alex Thomson. Thomson, the Oxbridge educated war correspondent who has reported from the ground in Afghanistan, The Balkans and Africa looked to be real coup.

Until he swung in to action, like a fourth rate stand in for John Wayne.
His first report promised much but delivered nothing other than the sordid spectacle of him bullying an old man for old news (Hugh Adam).

His second report saw him bullying an incompetent and very uncomfortable looking Stewart Regan. It must have been “So far, so good” then, as the agenda schemers clearly wanted a bully with no scruples.
Unfortunately it then started to go downhill.

Thomson broadcast to Channel 4 viewers at the end of March that it had been two years since David Murray owned Rangers, when, as Leggat pointed out, it was nine months.

He had previously stated he bought a ticket at £30 for the recent Old Firm game and sat in the Rangers end. On his blog his “photographic” evidence was taken from the Celtic end. The ticket should have cost £42. Did he lie or is he just stupid?
Then we come to his latest embarrassment.

Since his first visit to Glasgow Thomson had claimed that a local journalist had physically threatened him, after taking umbrage to Thomson’s claims that Glasgow’s sports hacks were lazy and afraid of asking the difficult questions.

The ultimate irony is that Thomson had been consulting Graham Spiers, who has written match reports from his living room and written copy for press conferences he has not attended. Not doing background checks on the credibility of sources is also a huge mistake.

That’s not to mention the continuing dialogue with McGlone and Phil Gillisomething, who spend every waking hour on an agenda against Rangers.

Of course Thomson has already been manipulated to broadcast republican Propaganda in the form of a documentary on “Bloody Sunday” some years back. Of course Thomson claims in public never to have met Macsomethingorother, although I am informed that there is a strange coincidence of both Phil and Alex living in Belfast at the same time in the late 1990s. What a coincidence.

So, what of the claims of a threat?

As time has gone by, without any formal complaint to the Police, no one being charged and no one being named, Thomson started being challenged on Twitter by both Rangers fans and Celtic fans to name, shame and press charges.

Thomson then promised to reveal all on a Radio Clyde phone in, and provide evidence of said threat of physical violence

What followed was probably the biggest embarrassment of the lot, and an error symptomatic of sheer laziness and trust in a group of manipulative liars.

Thomson went on Radio Clyde and quoted a threat via the medium of Twitter by a fake account in the name of David Leggat. The Twitter handle @LeggoisBlotto really should have given the game away that it wasn’t Leggat.

A Quick look on Celtic Minded confirmed that the account was set up by a user called “MK Ultra”, who also Tweeted as Leebowers.

As far as I can see, references to both accounts on Celtic Minded have been deleted in a desperate attempt to cover the tracks of said person, who clearly doesn’t want people to know a) he was behind both accounts, and b) that the fake Leggat account threatened Thomson.

I also understand that any posts on Celtic Minded that include such detail were chopped last night.

So, the much talked about threat to Thomson as it stands amounts to a tweet from a fake account set up by a user of Celtic Minded.

That Thomson was taken in by such a move without verifying its validity is yet more evidence of an apparently credible journalist being lazy, gullible, and far from the thorough journalist he would have us believe

Of course, with his credibility in tatters this morning, Thomson is still claiming that he has further evidence of threats which he will take to the police

Can he be believed though? Has he thoroughly checked his evidence, and its source? Do his claims have enough credibility to secure a successful prosecution?

I’m not a betting man but wouldn’t recommend putting your money on it.

Thomson is losing credibility faster than Neil Lennon can run at a referee, and people are already wondering about the credibility of his reports from far flung war torn countries.

If he can be so amateur and prone to error in Glasgow, how can he be trusted to be precise and accurate anywhere else?

If I was Thomson’s boss, the Paisley born Jim Gray of ITN, I would be worrying about the integrity of any report broadcast by Thomson.

Lucky I’m not Jim Gray then, eh Alex?

Bill