From feather dusters to cocks of Craiglockhart Hill, no-one could blame Edinburgh Lib Dems for being cock-a-hoop after their narrow and unexpected victory in last week’s council by-election.

Leaping from fifth in 2022 to first, with the Conservatives going in the opposite direction, is quite a turnaround and had it not been for the disaster of the Colinton by-election last November – when their victorious candidate Louise Spence was packing her bags for a new life in the Gulf before the last vote was counted – the Lib Dems would now have 15 councillors, only two behind the SNP.

There might still have been a second Colinton by-election, because the SNP’s Marco Biagi would probably still have left when appointed a government special adviser, and without the Spence controversy the Lib Dems would have won that too, giving them 16 seats.

But even with 14, the Lib Dems are in pole position at the head of an informal Stop-the-Nats-and-Crazy-Greens coalition which, with Conservative support, has until now kept the bedraggled Labour administration in place.

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Labour did surprisingly well, topping first preferences despite national chaos over welfare and winter fuel allowances, as well as bruising allegations of sexual harassment against former council group leader Cammy Day, for which police found no evidence of criminality.

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