SOME months ago out canvassing in the Meadowfield area of Edinburgh I approached a tidy bungalow with a big 4x4 on the driveway with reasonable optimism, only to be told in no uncertain terms to get lost. Not because the chap was vehemently anti-Tory, but because “we were all corrupt” and in the driving February rain I had no desire to winkle out of him his preferred system of local service delivery.

His was the most extreme, but by no means the only expression of disdain for anyone up for election, presumably following the Billy Connolly line that those thinking of standing should automatically be debarred. When it was dark and miserable there were times I tended to agree on grounds of insanity.

And so to last Friday’s council election count at Meadowbank and the adjudication process for rejected ballot papers. It’s a marvel just how inventive some people can be to register a protest, so fair play to the bloke (I presume it was a bloke) who took considerable time to draw a little phallus in each of the eight boxes on our paper. I’ll never know if he deliberately put the smallest one next to my name.

Then there were the A-board saboteurs of Abbeyhill and Willowbrae who would have had a laugh if they’d seen me searching for them in the dark alleys near the polling stations after voting finished last Thursday. No matter; 2,500 people had already given their first preference to me, enough to top the poll and return me as an Edinburgh City councillor.

So like the other 62 successful candidates, the months of pounding the streets had paid off, and elected with me in Craigentinny/Duddingston were the SNP’s Ian Campbell and local Labour stalwart Joan Griffiths. The fourth councillor was one of the Green Party’s big successes on the night, Alex Staniforth, whose targeting of the eclectic Abbeyhill area paid big dividends.

Banking on a surge of support from disaffected Labour voters the SNP put up three candidates, and with 500 local branch members according to one activist I spoke to (Herald columnist David Torrance’s dad as it turned out) who would have bet against them? But some thought three was a risky strategy and so it transpired; preferences for the two SNP candidates alphabetically lower down the ballot paper were split and with the strong Green showing neither made it. Sitting councillor Alex Lunn, who had defected from Labour and had fallen out with the local party, lost by a whisker.

If my result was notable, the standout in Edinburgh was Ashley Graczyk, who topped the first preferences in what was solidly Labour Sighthill/Gorgie and as news filtered through to Meadowbank of Conservative councillors elected in places like Ferguslie Park and Shettleston it was clear something extraordinary was happening, and that’s how it was reported.

So arguments have raged about claims of a biased media downplaying the SNP’s success in finally ejecting Labour from their local government redoubts. Most Tories would laugh at any suggestion BBC Scotland was biased towards them, but by any measure Labour’s pain has been inflicted as much by Conservatives as Nationalists.

The SNP’s problem is it is now hard to separate its electoral performance from the independence campaign, so with its total vote share last week unchanged from 2012 the story became as much the stalling of the second referendum bid as the threat now posed to the SNP by the continued Tory revival.

Some of the electorate may be cynical, but we get to do it all again in four weeks’ time. And at least we got our A-boards back.

But it’s also clear that many people simply don’t understand the STV system, despite it being clearly explained both on the ballot and by the polling officers that you need to number your preferences and not just put crosses next to the candidates you like; 262 rejections in my ward weren’t all creative objectors.