Right around the time Coyne got involved in ME/CFS advocacy he said (and I'm paraphrasing) "I'm not one of you - I'm an outsider, not a patient. Consequently there are things I can get away with doing that you can't. I'm going to create a lot of fuss and noise - that's part of how I operate. When I do things that anger or embarass you - and I will - you should distance yourselves and disown me and say 'He's not one of us' - because it's true, I'm not."
Coyne's justification for his infamous wild abusive facebook rant which left quite a few ME sufferers with exacerbated symptoms (no small matter, but then he wouldn't know because he's not a sufferer) was if I remember rightly because the "ME community" wasn't policing itself effectively to prevent the NIH (was it?) from receiving critical emails when we should in his opinion have been responding with undying gratitude. He also stooped to using a few falacious BPS arguments (scarring scientists off etc) and threatened to strop off in a huff (seems to be a lot of that around lately) if "something wasn't done".
So after lecturing us about the tone of our emails and how it can risk setting back the hard work of more moderate advocates, here we see Coyne's chosen email tone hogging the limelight in a Times article, where other advocates are relegated to "Coyne's allies". There's a pot and a kettle in this somewhere. I'm actually quite happy with how the Times article turned out, but it could have gone horribly wrong if the article had been more SMC sympathetic, which was a very real risk given their past coverage of ME and obsequiousness to the SMC.
I'm not convinced Coyne has a grand plan. He just has a habit of sometimes losing it and not giving a shit any more. This can sometimes work to our advantage, sometimes to our disadvantage. We've been relatively lucky so far. He is not here to save us (something he said himself), his beef is with UK psychaitry. His interests happen to overlap with ours to that extent. On any occasion where the same criticisms that can be made of the UK BPS brigade can be levelled at a North American (actually Canadian) academic such as the sex-obsessed and delusional Edward Shorter, Coyne has reacted towards us with the same filth and the fury we all know and love him for. Ditto if we criticize the US NIH. Off limits I'm afraid, just stick it to the Brits and leave it at that.
So we should take him at his word - give him a cheery wave when our interests coincide and things turn out well, but be ready to distance ourselves from him at a moment's notice.