As the Scottish Parliament election looms, it’s worth remembering that police need to be adequately funded if they are to carry out long, expensive investigations into serious crimes This is my latest column, published on today's Scotsman (28th April 2026) When to stop investigating a crime? It’s a vexed question that every police force must answer sooner or later. Some crimes are so terrible that they must be investigated to the last but, in most cases, it’s a pragmatic deci

This is my latest Scotsman column, published in today's paper (14th April 2026). Antecedents are among the key components of any murder investigation. The careful examination of the life of the deceased can give clues as to how they met their end. Likewise, the same exercise for the accused often offers strong indications of how and why their behaviour led to catastrophe. Carrying out a detailed ‘antecedents’ investigation is a skill-set that must be learned and is often a jo

This is my 200th column for the Scotsman, published in today's newspaper (31st March 2026). The elephant in the room remains the fraught question about the source of the killer Covid virus. No one who’s read Baroness Heather Hallett’s CV could have doubted she would be fastidious in her chairing of the UK Covid Inquiry. A former Appeal Court judge, she led the comprehensive inquiry into the 7/7 terrorist bombing. Her remit was straightforward: “To examine the UK’s response to