HUGH KEEVINS PLAYS TO THE GALLERY WITH LATEST, ERROR-STREWN NONSENSE
- BY LIAM CARRIGAN
- Jun 29
- 3 min read
I don’t like to get personal when it comes to critiquing fellow writers and their work. So, from the outset, I want to make it clear: I hold no personal ill-will towards Hugh Keevins. In fact, the one time I met him, he was very friendly, albeit he was also absolutely steaming drunk at the time.
Anyway, his latest piece for the Sunday Mail today contains a whole lot of condescending, factually wrong, and somewhat ignorant comments regarding recent coverage of Rangers new owners, and the very valid questions people like me have asked, and will continue to ask amid a total lack of transparency coming out of Ibrox.
Hugh Keevins: A Caricature of the Journalist he Used to Be
One of the basic tenets of journalism in today’s online world, is that you need to get your facts right. Then you need to check them, then you need to double check them before you commit anything to print.
I’m not immune to this. A reader called me out for spelling Matt O’Riley’s name wrong last week, and I was glad he did. It has since been corrected.
I doubt though that Hugh Keevins will be in such a rush to correct his assertion in today’s piece that Rangers new Chairman Andrew Cavenagh built his reputation as the head of a "billion dollar health insurance company."
Wrong on two counts Shug.
First, Pareto Health, the company where Cavenagh serves as CEO brought in $139 million in revenue according to the latest figures. That's a wee bit short of a billion, at least according to my own, somewhat limited, arithmetical prowess.
What Keevins is probably referring to is an outdated report from 2023 which states that Pareto Health had made $1.3 billion in cost savings for their clients.
This brings me to the second part of Keevin’s error. This isn’t a health insurance company. It’s a consultancy firm that helps employers minimize the health insurance coverage they need to provide for their staff.
Kind of the opposite of a health insurance firm if we’re going to be pedantic about it. Their goal is to reduce insurance coverage, not provide it.
On a side note, I think this speaks volumes to the kind of character Mr Cavenagh is, that he chose to make his (at this point unknown) fortune from a business model so utterly vile and exploitative.
A proper investigative journalist would ask what exactly is it that such a character would find attractive about investing in Rangers.
Anyway, from that point on Hugh Keevins defaults to his usual condescending, lecturing tone, seeking to educate the reader about various Scottish slang terms in the absence of actual, relevant commentary on the subject at hand.
I get why he does this though. The reason why people like Hugh Keevins continue to make a living from Scottish mainstream journalism is exactly why I chose to walk away from the same industry in my early 20s and move to Japan.
He’s accepted that the truth doesn’t matter anymore. It’s about playing a character, and telling people what they expect to hear from that character. It’s mostly performative.
He’s got the role of Scottish football’s curmudgeonly old grandpa down to a fine art.
But it isn’t journalism, and the Daily Record and Sunday Mail will continue to bleed readership the more they continue to pretend that it is.
Hugh Keevins was, for decades, a respected journalist. It’s actually really sad to see someone like him reduced to this kind of pathetic sideshow.
Meanwhile, Rangers have once again sold their soul (if indeed they ever had one to begin with) to another person of unknown financial means, and who now has total, unaccountable control of the fledgling club and all its assets.
Interesting times ahead, but I doubt Mr Keevins will bother to talk about them in any meaningful detail.
