But Mr Revie is needed to guarantee Labour's hold on the council, therefore he retained his post at Thursday's meeting.Then there is the bogey of Militant. Mr Mack and the SNP accuse the leadership, including the Labour leader, Hugh Henry, of being Militant stooges, but there is little evidence. Mr Henry admits to having been involved in Militant in the late Eighties, but says he left long ago.There are no heroes in this story, and the villains are pretty mild. There are no councillors swanning about in expensive cars or living in houses paid for by developers, as there has been in Doncaster, another rotten Labour borough. Take Tommy Graham, the Renfrewshire West MP who has been suspended for spreading malicious rumours about his colleagues.

Senior local Labour figures are not exactly complimentary about him "He's an arsehole and should never have been made an MP But he's not evil," said one. Mr Graham is not accused, as originally thought, of having contributed to Mr McMaster's depression through rumour-mongering, but he did not help his own cause when he blurted out to the local evening paper that the dead MP was a drunk who consumed "doubles and doubles". As a fellow MP put it, "Tommy came up from the hard school, and he's capable of being pretty vicious when he attacks."Mr Graham is an uninspiring but loyal Labour hack, a bit of a buffoon with a sharp tongue, who has mostly toed the line, apart from indulging in the infighting which passes for politics in Renfrewshire. He weighs 20 stone, and is a constant smoker; there are fears among fellow MPs that this affair will damage his health.Under pressure to be seen to be doing something, Labour has launched another inquiry into events in Paisley But we have been here before.

There have been half-a-dozen inquiries into FCB by agencies ranging from the Scottish Office to the Royal Bank of Scotland, in response to allegations by Mrs Adams that it has been used as a front for laundering drugs money and other criminal activity. None has so far come up with any evidence, and the police investigation seems to have got nowhere. No one is suggesting that Mr Revie has enriched himself, but locals in Ferguslie Park are confident that someone at the company or the council has lined their pockets with the casual workers' cash.There was, too, a Labour enquiry into Paisley in 1995. It remains unpublished, but its leaked findings bode ill for the chances of truth emerging this time.

It paints a picture of a deeply divided party but concedes that much of the information supplied was "anecdotal and cannot be tested for proof" Mrs Adams's party, Paisley North, remains suspended. Her enemies suggest this has helped her, since it meant that she did not have to submit herself for reselection to her local party. A suspension of Paisley South seems inevitable, which means that the national party can impose the new MP.All this serves the interests of New Labour, which dislikes the old west of Scotland working-class MPs: they fit as poorly on Labour's benches as into their suits. In many of the national newspapers there have been pompous calls for a major inquiry headed by a senior judge, but they have been written by leader-writers who have never been near Paisley and have little understanding of the issues.