How Craig Whyte's QC Donald Findlay had the fraud trial jury laughing

The extrovert defence lawyer, who was appointed vice-chairman of Rangers by Sir David Murray, but resigned in 1999 after a video emerged of him singing “anti-Celtic anthems” at a private function was the trial's showman.

Findlay, renowned as one of Scotland's most successful lawyers who was inspired as a child by the 1950s TV series Boyd QC, defended Mr Whyte with a mixture of good humour, cutting remarks and even a few foul ups.

On one occasion he was scolded by the judge for appearing to make bold statements, rather than asking questions, and at times the relationship between Mr Findlay and Mr Murray in court was frosty.

The demonstrative pipe-smoking QC's eccentric style of delivery at times had the jury laughing out loud.

Often alternating between having his hands in his pockets and having them clasped as if concluding the fingerplay to the Here's The Church, Here's the Steeple rhyme, he preferred to stand right in front of the jury, rather than use a lectern like his prosecuting counterpart.

"Football of itself is like every other spectator sport, if you think about it dispassionately, it's daft," he said during one exchange.

"You sit there and you watch 22 men on a rectangular piece of grass kicking a ball split between three posts with a net behind it. What's the point of that," said the 66-year-old chairman of Cowdenbeath Football Club.

"I don't know if you follow tennis. But Sir Andy Murray is making progress in the Australian [French] Open. I sit and watch that and I watch him hit the thing back and forward, and I think, why don't you just take the net away and get on with the game, it would make it far easier," he said.

"We get all this stuff about golf. But why would you invent a game, with a stick thing that is ill-designed for the purpose of hitting a ball into a hole you can't even see.

"And yet people become obsessed with and obsessive about sport."

Then there was the tale about the clerk of the judiciary whose overall disposition was that he was "born to be an undertaker".

"If he had been a character in the darkest of novels by Charles Dickens, he would have been no way out of place. He really was born to be an undertaker," said the QC with his mutton-chop sideburns, solemn black gown and horsehair wig.

"Frank on the sunniest of days could create a ball of gloom out of nothing at all."

He then told the jury about a sitting of the High Court where "everything that could have gone wrong went wrong" and by mid-morning "nothing had been achieved and the whole thing was a complete and utter shambles".

A number of the accused were "so bored with the whole thing, they threatened to go home until we sorted it all out".

A meeting with Frank the undertaker-like clerk was called.

"Silence fell upon us. He looked at us all and said,'I appreciate that we do not believe in a blame free culture, but I just want you to know that this mess has got mmmm all to do with me', turned on his heels and walked out the door and left us," recalled Mr Findlay to the sound of jury laughter who had endured six weeks of trial evidence.

"And the number of times in the course of this trial that that mental picture of Frank has come to my mind has surprised even me."

Mr Findlay showed his more pointed side, when he bluntly reminded Mr Murray of the rules of cross-examination. “I know this is very unfamiliar to you as it will be to many people, but I’m afraid the rules of this are that [when I put] my question to you, if it’s not objected to, you are are obliged to answer the question. Changing the subject in these courts is what we call not answering the question," he said.

But the QC, appeared a times to have empathy for Murray when he suggested to the former Rangers chief: “You were being let down by people who didn’t have a clue what they were doing when running Rangers.”

And in a concluding question to Murray, Findlay said: “From you stepping down as chairman and Craig Whyte taking over, what had these men done to your football club, Sir David? What had they done to our club?”