With just a three-page report, the curtain was drawn on one of the biggest scandals in recent Scottish local government history, not just the City of Edinburgh Council.

As of Thursday, the Great Tram Scandal is officially over. It took Lord Hardie nine years to complete his report into the billion-pound fiasco, longer than it took to build the line from Edinburgh Airport to the city centre, and a further three years for the council to complete its deliberations over its findings. A quarter of a century.

From the initial planning, the doomed local referendum, the failure to heed good advice, the pig-headed determination to ignore problems as they arose, the protracted legal wrangles, the months of inactivity explained away as technical issues or workmen on their breaks, the reduction of the line to a sawn-off airport link, the relentless churn of senior figures, the hideously expensive deal to resolve the issues, the desperate reputation rescue missions which went on as the protracted inquiry prepared its inevitable conclusions, and the ridiculous time it took to complete the report, there is not a single aspect of this saga which reflected well on those involved.

The Scottish Parliament has just proved it is soft in the head. Again

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Why must stable Scotland put up with all this English chaos and nonsense?

And now we have it, the final verdict delivered by the council’s Deputy Monitoring Officer Kevin McKee. “In the opinion of the Deputy Monitoring Officer, there were serious and systemic........

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