At the end of June, I was in The Old Fruit Market in Glasgow with Martin Frizell for the inaugural Scottish podcast awards. We’d been nominated for This Much is True Crime in the ‘True Crime, Mystery & The Dark Stuff’ category. Along with Kaye Adams, the co-host for the evening was the Clydebank comedian Marc Jennings, who good-heartedly joked about how we should therefore all watch out for flying pencils.

However, it was another of his quips that really caught my attention. Jennings joshed that James English – the Scot with the incredibly successful podcast Anything Goes – had intended to be at the awards but had had to cancel as he was now interviewing Peter Murrell. Anything Goes does indeed offer a platform to various hoodlums, gangsters, waifs and strays with little or no pushback from English about what they claim, or how they justify their offending behaviour. Frankly, it’s why they choose to go on his podcast.

Like all good jokes, Jennings captured a widespread sense that people really would like to hear from Murrell and try to understand what had motivated him to defraud SNP party funds for the best part of 12 years – a crime for which he had just been sentenced to five years and three months in prison. We didn’t learn much about his motivation from the judge’s sentencing remarks and, other than expressing remorse for what he had done, Murrell hasn’t offered any explanation himself. So, in those absences, we are left with what Police Scotland suggested about the frauds - which they claimed had allowed Murrell to maintain........

© Herald Scotland