MY 12-year-old son’s eyes were wide with astonishment. “You’ve got an iPhone 7 Plus?” he gawped, his tone making it very clear he felt this was a complete waste on a techno-numpty like me.
So it was to further amazement that I then produced the iPad and the laptop and the back-pack to put it all in. “We’ll be paying for all of this, then,” he said, the “we” being the tax-payer, not the family, and displaying why modern studies is one of his better subjects. Yes, dear reader, this was the booty from day one of my new life as an Edinburgh city councillor, standard issue to all 63 of us. There are good reasons to keep council business separate from other activities, especially for those of us with other jobs, and a different phone might be a pain to cart about but it certainly makes managing official duties much easier, but this is Rolls-Royce kit. It’s in contrast to when I joined Ruth Davidson’s team in 2012 and was issued with a party Blackberry, which I found had once belonged to party chairman Eric Pickles after I received congratulatory texts for a sterling performance on the Today programme from people obviously not as close to him as they thought.
It’s now a fortnight since the election and for rookie councillors like me the programme has been dominated by induction sessions about conduct, responsibilities and services, which is obviously a good thing, even if there is the faintest overtone that the officers run the show and we greenhorns shouldn’t get too uppity just because we’ve been elected. Somewhat chilling, however, was advice that the Standards Commission was taking an increasingly dim view of any public criticism of officers by elected members. Given Edinburgh’s recent track record with the trams fiasco, the baby ashes scandal, and the statutory repairs corruption trials to name but three, robust criticism from elected members might be something the public expects, but the warning was clear.
Full standards investigations were very rare, we were assured, despite the fact that one of my colleagues is being investigated right now for naming an official involved in witch-hunt allegations during a council debate. Who knows, maybe I’ll face a standards investigation for even mentioning this? But for someone coming from the journalism side of the fence, it’s a revelation to discover that even in a debate there is no equivalent to the qualified privilege which protects accurate reports of official proceedings from legal action, or indeed the absolute exemption which allows MPs speaking in Parliament to smash injunctions.
Less of a revelation has been the manoeuvring, or lack of it, around who will actually form the administration in Edinburgh, given the impossibility of a coalition between the only two groups able to produce a majority of 32, the SNP on 19 and the 18 Conservatives. 12-strong Labour is desperate to sign off a deal with the nationalists, to the extent that the council’s communications team was geared up to announce the pact last week only for Labour’s Scottish Executive to pull the plug at the last minute for fear it would destroy Ian Murray’s “Only Labour can stop the SNP” strategy to defend his Edinburgh South seat. Now it’s obvious the deal is only on hold, that line is looking thin to say the least. So at today’s first meeting of the new council, it’s almost certain that the only decision will be to appoint a new Lord Provost, for which the SNP has nominated their recently deposed leader Frank Ross, who faces a standards inquiry into allegations of failing to declare his ownership of a Highland hotel in his register of interests. There are alternatives, Labour’s Donald Wilson might be back for a second stint, but in the game playing and deal-doing which will characterise the next five years, who knows who might emerge with the big chain this morning.
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