I hadn't seen Donald Findlay in years.

But there he was at the appointed hour, dressed up to the nines as usual, an Edwardian peacock in dress-coat, perjink shirt-and-tie, with various other adornments. A waft of lovely, rich pipe-tobacco blew in with his arrival.

"Have you spruced yourself up like this all your life?" I ask him of his distinctive – some might say outdated – dress code.

"I've been a bit like this ever since I was a kid – I always had ideas above my station, I liked being slightly different," he replies. "In part it stems from when I started off in the law, when I didn't have a public school background or 'family connections'. Going to the bar in those days in Edinburgh was quite a big step. To some extent I felt I had to make a mark."

I found myself groping to find the right terms to describe Findlay's appearance. "You're sort of old worldy . . . old-fashioned . . . it's maybe . . ."

"You're getting there," he said. "The word you're looking for is 'Edwardian'. I always liked that period. I used to see old pictures of the Edwardians in their long coats and I'd think 'yes, that's it!' I never went without a tie and my tie always had to match my shirts."

Findlay is now 62 – and he looks well. Infamously, he has been one of Scotland's leading criminal defence lawyers – infamous, that is, due to some of the rum and downright vindictive characters he defended – and is still riding high.

The game of football and defending criminals – never to be confused – have been his two gigs and, put together, they have created Findlay's controversy.

It is an image he disputes with a tired smile. "I have never understood my 'controversy'," he says. "I don't actually think I've ever said or done anything that was controversial. A friend of mine said to me, 'Donald, your problem is, you have gone through your whole life with the view, I don't see what all the fuss is about.' Maybe he was right."

I dutifully remind him of one of those Findlay "controversies" – his 1999 public singing of a controversial Rangers song, captured on film, which cost him his vice-chairman's role at Ibrox. Findlay claims to be laidback, saying not much bothers him these days, but this topic, 14 years on, certainly seemed to animate him.

"I don't regard that as controversial at all – but others did," he says. "At the time it was seen as hugely controversial, it was one big lump of controversy that was dumped on my head. But today I don't give it a moment's thought.

"Looking back I daresay one thing about 1999 that did annoy me was, so many of the people who were critical of me for what I did, did exactly the same thing. It was the level of hypocrisy about the whole thing that staggered me the most.

"There were lies and misrepresentations about it which annoyed me. A number of your colleagues reported that I was 'forced to resign.' I wasn't, I chose to resign. Or: 'Findlay was sacked by David Murray.' Well, no he wasn't . . . I chose to step down. Plenty people lied about me back then."

At this, he spots my copy of the Daily Record lying on our coffee table, and becomes even more scathing, pointing at it. "That piece of garbage there – that thing that calls itself a newspaper – ran a story about me. It was a set-up. I phoned David Murray about 7am and said, 'David, you are about to be greeted by this stuff in the newspapers and so I will quit and kill it stone dead.'"

With that off his chest, we moved on to the fate of Rangers in the past 12 months. Findlay, unfathomably to me, has argued that the practical necessity of Rangers being in the Scottish Premier League should have overrun all other rights and wrongs about the club's liquidation. He has derided the SPL chairmen's "bleating" and is scathing of how Rangers were subsequently placed in the Irn-Bru third division.

"Do you not have to look at the practical realities?" he says. "Rangers – and I would say exactly the same about Celtic – are not a football club. What they bring to Scotland financially – not just employment at Ibrox but in terms of newsagents, off-licences, taxi-drivers, the whole bit – is huge.

"With Rangers sent down, what are we left with? We're left with Rangers in the outer darkness for three years, and a one-team league in the SPL. What is the benefit of that to Scottish football?"

But, surely, I argue, the matrix of right and wrong cannot come secondary to simply what is best in terms of cash-generation? "Why not?" he replies.

"The SPL needs Rangers. Few SPL chairmen came out in support of Rangers and that took me by surprise. We used to make a joke at Ibrox: 'We are Rangers, super Rangers, no-one likes us, we don't care . . .' But I hadn't quite appreciated, prior to this, the degree to which people didn't like Rangers, right across the board."

And why do you think that might be, I asked him. (I actually agreed with Findlay to a degree on this widespread contempt for Rangers). "I don't know the exact answer to that. I have said, and I will say again, that maybe I bear a part of the responsibility for it. In the great days at Rangers we did lord it a bit, there's no doubt about that.

"Looking back on it now, I think that was wrong. Someone once said, 'never kick a man when you're on the way up, because you might meet him when you're on the way down.' I think that has been a classic case with Rangers."

These days Findlay's football is spent in his own kind of outer darkness – at Central Park, Cowdenbeath, where he is chairman. And he genuinely loves it.

"There was nothing quite like the last day of the season, when we stayed up – just – by beating Hamilton Accies. The high I got from that, I don't get that anywhere else.

"When I first went to Cowdenbeath a few years ago, their very existence was under threat. The club scarcely owned a ball, a goal-net. But we're still here and have survived in the first division. So there is an element of the 'two fingers to you' about it."

And what about some of these unsavoury characters he is forever defending in court – the type Joe Public in Scotland has no time for at all? "I would have defended Saddam Hussein – of course I would. My job is to defend people, not to say, 'well, he's badder than him . . .'

"I do what I do to resist the power of the state. The way the state interferes in most people's lives is by accusing them of committing a crime. Well, if the state is to make that allegation, then the state should prove it. If you like, it is my job to make sure that the guilty people end up in prison."

I found this a bit of a convoluted argument. But, then again, Findlay does both argument and polemic very well indeed.