U-turn- Keith Jackson reveals his heroic battle to expose Craig Whyte as a non-billionaire to his mate Dave Murray

Keith Jackson has revealed details of his heroic battle to expose Craig Whyte as a wrong ‘un before a pound coin was rolled into the sweaty palm of Dave Murray with Rangers sold.

Unfortunately the hard work of the award winning Daily Record reporter never saw the light of day in the Glasgow based newspaper.

Instead the Record doubled and trebled down on the billionaire from Motherwell securing a glorious future for their favourite club, another Murray like era was about to get underway grinding Celtic into the dirt.

Murray liked nothing more than lording it over the 1967 European Cup winners with that triumph firing up his ambitions to ridiculous levels.

Backed by succulent cheerleaders from throughout the media the Edinburgh based businessman could do no wrong.

When he instructed their favourite messengers to describe Whyte as a billionaire Jackson went even further by telling readers that Sir Craigy Bhoy had wealth off the radar despite barely being known in Motherwell never mind elsewhere. Excitement bounced off the pages at the discovery of Mini Murray.

Whyte was known in Scottish business circles, he operated in the shadows with his father Tom regularly did business with Murray.

The only people duped were the Record’s Army of Readers, the day after Murray accepted that pound coin Mister Whyte was cheered down Edmiston Drive and up the marble staircase as if he was royalty.

Recalling his own significant part in the death of Rangers, Jackson used his Daily Record column to put context in it all and reveal that he was anything but the loyalist of cheerleaders!

But what happened around 2010 – at a time when Murray’s world was on the brink of financial collapse – would change the nature of our relationship permanently.

Circumstances dictated a change in his own persona. For the first time, he seemed vulnerable and perhaps even uncertain of himself.

And it was during this period that he spirited up Craig Whyte from almost nowhere and presented him, via the pages of this newspaper, as the man best qualified to take on his own mantle as the next custodian of Rangers Football Club.

I’ve done the mea culpa on this one many times before. But, for what it’s worth, I apologise for my part in it once again. The whole Motherwell billionaire abomination will go with me to my grave: Here lies Keith Jackson, finally off the radar.

What has been forgotten along the way, however, is what followed almost immediately and would go on for most of the next six months between November 2010 and May 2011.

Within a day or two of that initial story naming Whyte as the man on the brink of an Ibrox takeover, it was becoming very obvious to me that the Daily Record had been misled and used, largely to Murray’s advantage.

If only Jackson had revealed that to Record readers they could have been spared more than a decade of pain. Internet Bampots sussed out Whyte within 12 hours of Jackson’s WORLD EXCLUSIVE on the billionaire from Motherwell.

Around this time I first met Paul Murray, who was a director on the Rangers board. He smelled a rat from the start and for the next six months we worked together to expose it while there was still time to do something about it.

David Murray, on the other hand, was battoning down the hatches.

Just as well the Record continued to avoid publishing the truth about Whyte.

To this day I vividly remember what was to be one of our final phone conversations. I asked Murray straight out if he truly believed Whyte to be the real deal.

Not only did he admit to not knowing for sure but, moreover, he also expressed his concerns about Whyte’s apparent lack of ‘trappings of wealth’.

From memory, it went something along the lines of, ‘Yes the guy owns a castle but you’d struggle to buy a two bedroom flat in Edinburgh for the same price!’.

That was the moment I realised without doubt that Murray was, at the very least, prepared to take an enormous gamble by signing off on the takeover deal.

And still not a peep in the Record, did Jackson hold back for fear of being left out of the Matt McKay swoop, or the arrival of Juan Ortiz from Spanish aces Almeria?

Six months later he went through with it anyway and the rest, of course, is history.

And it’s why it’s so unedifying to see Murray doubling down on his position in his newly published memoirs.

He wasn’t duped. Don’t be so ridiculous.

Someone else was duped, and their Army of Readers.

On the contrary, he was warned over and over by his own directors and a whole load of others that selling to Whyte would almost certainly have catastrophic consequences for the club. And he chose to ignore them.

But not a word of warning never mind criticism from his favourite newspaper, some referred to it as the in-house magazine of MIM.

At the eleventh hour, in sheer desperation, Paul Murray tabled a counter offer and one which would have safeguarded the club by making Murray International responsible for any tax liabilities left over from the reckless use of EBT’s.

Given that the full extent of those HMRC penalties was unknown at that time, no other deal made any sense at all. And Sir David knew it.

In many ways, it’s really quite sad that this will be his lasting legacy. But Murray is just going to have to live with it.

Murray isn’t the only one living with it, circulation of under 40,000 today suggests that Jackson and the Record are also living with it. When Whyte had wealth off the radar 300,000 copies of the Record were being bought a day, mainly in Scotland but also in major English cities with copies also sent to Spain and Ireland.

In 2014 the Record came up with The Vow on the eve of the Scottish independence vote, writing off instantly 45% of potential readers with a ‘mistake’ as big as their forever backing of Murray and Whyte.

Unfortunately it seems that Jackson has learned little from that experience, this year he has been encouraging the Record’s remaining readers that their club is now owned by the San Francisco 49ers and not the shadowy American ‘tycoon’ Andrew Cavenagh.