HAD Scottish football been blessed with more people of the integrity, intelligence and character of Turnbull Hutton, who sadly passed away on Sunday night, the sport might not be in its current disheveled state.

As Raith Rovers pointed out yesterday (mon), their honorary president and former chairman will be sorely missed - and far beyond his immediate circle of family and friends.

I met Turnbull just once, but what an encounter it was. A walk up a steep incline to the Edinburgh home he shared with wife Margo was rewarded with the type of interview every journalist should cherish. Turnbull clearly wanted to let off steam, and boy did he do it . . .

The football establishment got it with both barrels on that memorable August, 2012, lunchtime. Stewart Regan, Neil Doncaster, Walter Smith and Ally McCoist were among the targets - and as befitting a man with a degree from Harvard University, Turnbull was firing from the head, rather than the hip.

Some weeks earlier, slightly out of breath at the top of Hampden's steps, Turnbull had told reporters: "We've been lied to by the SFA, the SPL. We've been threatened, bullied - it's not football as I know it."

He was, of course, referring to the establishment plot to afford Rangers a soft landing in Division 1, instead of - as transpired - the fourth tier of Scottish football. But it was in July, the month before we spoke, that he uttered the words which were to bring him cult status. "In essence," he said memorably, "the SPL is like a dead parrot."

It was a colourful, Pythonesque, comment from a colourful man. The essence of Turnbull can be found in the regular column he once wrote for the Scotch Whisky Review. The illustration at the top shows him standing, arms folded imposingly, between two casks of whisky, each one bellowing flames. The column itself was called Devil's Advocate.

In a world of increasing political correctness, Turnbull liked to portray himself as unreconstructed old school. Bemoaning the demise of the liquid lunch, apparently a staple of his early time as managing director of Diageo Operations Scotland, he wrote: "Fizzy bloody water appeared at meetings, as did boring bloody sandwiches.

"Our colleagues went off on team-building exercises - making rafts and abseiling - and when they weren't bonding with each other they were out bloody jogging at lunchtime."

Having had a chuckle at this faux outrage while researching Turnbull's background, I didn't expect to be disappointed when we met. Over, I might add, coffee and snacks. Any number of events had fuelled his indignation; they included death threats aimed at fellow Raith director Eric Drysdale, and another to burn down Stark's Park. Closer to home, his property had very recently been burgled.

Set against all these, Stewart Regan's threat of a financial Armageddon for Scottish football if Rangers didn't get their parachute landing struck Turnbull as being so wide of the mark as to be risible. The summer of 2012 didn't show the Scottish FA chief executive in a good light and the Raith Rovers chairman would, at the time, have been happy to see the back of him.

Later, the two men came to a better understanding and accommodation. If Turnbull's pugnacious appearance was often matched by his disposition, he was also open-minded and not shy to be self-deprecating. He was, however, implacable in his belief that sporting fairness should prevail - and in that stance became a champion of many.

His death at the age of 68, after being diagnosed with leukaemia, is deeply saddening.