Crazed looking Craig Whyte reduced to Rangers revisionist as club still recovering from reign of deceit – Keith Jackson

Our man has his say on a rare public appearance from the disgraced former Ibrox chief

I won't claim to have watched it all because, well, why would you?

An hour and 40 minutes of Craig Whyte getting the reach around treatment from some fawning middle aged fella wearing a Balenciaga T-shirt? That’s time no-one is going to get back.

But, credit where it is due, some of the most risible soundbites to come out of Whyte’s public re-emergence are so extraordinarily warped that they really do have to be heard to be believed. Or, better still, to be held in complete and utter contempt.

“There’s absolutely nothing morally wrong with not paying taxes, the state is the enemy,” Whyte spews at one point from behind an increasingly manic grin. Soon after that he rambles off into what appears to be a defence of Andrew Tate, the online influencer who has been placed under house in Romania under investigation for all manner of sex crimes and human trafficking allegations.

“That’s what happens to people who are brave enough to put their head above the parapet,” Whyte adds while seemingly suggesting that Tate is, in fact, some sort of victim.

He’s speaking in wholly sympathetic terms too by the way, as if he and Tate have been unfairly scandalised by those notoriously nasty stitch up merchants of the mainstream media who, of course, are the real villains in all of this.

Almost as astonishingly, none of this is challenged by his nodding dog of an interviewer - who claims to be a Rangers supporter but who seems equally happy for his own club’s history to be re-written.

To save you the bother of having to sit through this toe curling abomination, the crux of Whyte’s argument - and not for the first time - is that he was guilty of absolutely nothing with regards to the financial collapse of Rangers shortly after he had purchased the club for £1 from David Murray back in 2011.

There was certainly nothing wreckless about flogging off three years worth of the club’s future season ticket sales in order to clear the debt and wipe Murray’s overdraft clean. Or in using the club’s own assets to pay for the balance of his takeover deal.

No, that was nothing more than routine practice, according to the man who once threatened to ban the Daily Record from Ibrox if he did not receive an apology when I first wrote about his ruinous financial plan and made it public in the summer of 2011.

Whyte remained adamant that our story was wrong for six months or so right up until the point that the administrators were on the verge of moving in - but only after we had published it all over again with irrefutable contractual details of his tie-in with Ticketus, written in black and white.

And yet, all this time later, he clings to the notion that he has been victimised. That it was the mainstream media - and not himself - who was guilty of such blatant dishonesty. He does go against his own grain by going on to admit that he effectively ‘handed Rangers on a plate’ to Charles Green as part of a duplicitous deal with administrators Duff and Phelps.

It’s just a shame he wasn’t prepared to be as upfront about it back at the time in 2012, when other more credible buyers were ready and willing to come to the stricken club’s rescue. Well meaning, proper businessmen such as Brian Kennedy and Paul Murray.

In summary, Whyte is to blame for the square root of nothing even though, more than a decade on, Rangers have yet to recover from his chaotic reign of dishonesty and deceit. He’s been reduced to playing the role of a slightly crazed looking, wide grinning revisionist on social media. And even that is more of a platform than this Joker deserves.

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