More allegations of bad behaviour in the increasingly dysfunctional City of Edinburgh Council once again demonstrate the Ethical Standards system needs a dose of common sense or scrapped altogether, writes Herald columnist John McLellan.

What a time to be a member of the Labour Party. You wait all these years to get a sniff of power and in the space of a few months the party’s reputation is up in smoke, vapourised, in ruins or whatever metaphor you can find for collapse.

Ah yes, collapse, as in moral as well as morale. All those years of frustration accompanied by the sure and certain sanctimony that if only you were in charge standards in public life would be so much better;  Labour memories, unlike those of Boris Johnson and Nicola Sturgeon, would not need to be sieves because theirs were so much purer in the first place. Dudgeon was rarely less than skyscraper height.

And now reality has bitten. Never mind a policy programme steered with all the precision of a clown car on a skid pan, there has been the jailing of the Runcorn MP Mike Amesbury, the shaming of Peter Mandelson over his seemingly unbreakable friendship with a notorious paedophile, ditto the MSP Pam Duncan-Clancy and newly-ennobled Lord Matthew Doyle and their continued association with paedophile Moray councillor Sean Morton, and close to home there’s dear old Cammy Day, the former leader of Edinburgh Council, whose penchant for visual self-marketing on dating sites knew no bounds. Certainly not of probity.

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