In the week that the television reconstruction of one of the most famous political sex scandals in living memory came to an end, another high-profile career came crashing down when Derek Mackay’s litany of inappropriate social media messages to a 16-year-old schoolboy were aired.

It’s a familiar tale – only the mechanics of delivery and denouement have changed.

John Profumo was the Secretary of State for War in 1961 when his affair with a 19-year-old good-time girl, which he at first denied, was revealed. He fell, not for deceiving his wife but the Parliament, lying to the Chamber and the Conservative Government. The salacious tale has played out, with some fictional deviations, over six weeks on TV in The Trial of Christine Keeler. That Keeler was sharing a bed with a Russian diplomat provided a national security excuse and added piquancy to the sexual stew.

READ MORE: Teenager at centre of Derek Mackay scandal speaks to police 

Mackay’s plunge from a dizzying ascent, tipped as a putative First Minister to instant resignation and suspension from the SNP, is both more tawdry and troubling that he may have been grooming a young boy in a blizzard of unwanted messages, and is unlikely to play out in widescreen in the future. Police may well interview him.

Here, then, are the scandals in British political life, selected from a welter – a cornucopia – of duplicity, corruption, sexual shenanigans, arrogance and downright stupidity.

The present Duke of York, Andrew, is mired in an alleged sex scandal, connected to a deceased paedophile and a then-17-year-old girl. He denies wrongdoing. A predecessor in 1809, Frederick, not just the Duke of York but the commander of the British armies in the war against Napoleon, found himself accused of selling commissions through an ex-mistress. He was the duke who marched the 10,000 men to the top of the hill and down again.

Parliament exonerated him and he went back to being commander-in-chief. He actually became heir to the throne but dropped dead, of dropsy, before he could take it.

It was the poet Philip Larkin who wrote that sexual intercourse began in 1963, probably taking his inspiration from the Profumo affair. The arrest of Mandy Rice-Davies (“Well he would say that wouldn’t he?”) was the last factor in destroying Profumo. He had had an affair with a Nazi spy in the 1930s – he was quite profligate in his connections to Britain’s perceived enemies – although that didn’t come out until a couple of years ago.

The 1960s may have swung, but things got really interesting in the 1970s.

Architect and businessman John Poulson was convicted of bribing council officials for building work in a massive corruption scam. Tory Home Secretary Reginald Maudling, tipped as a future Prime Minister, was forced to resign when it emerged that he was a director in a Poulson company and was pushing business his way.

READ MORE: Analysis: Does Derek Mackay scandal mark the beginning of the end for the SNP? 

Scandal wasn’t confined to the Conservatives. In November 1974, the former Labour minister John Stonehouse went swimming. Fatally, it appeared.

Stonehouse had left behind a pile of clothes on a beach in Miami and fled to Australia with his mistress to escape police pursuing him for fraud. When they caught him they thought he was the missing Lord Lucan and made him pull down his trousers to ensure he was not. Lucan had a six-inch scar on his thigh.

Of course, the real scandal of the age, which again provided a TV series, was the Jeremy Thorpe affair.

Thorpe, the Liberal Party leader, had had a homosexual affair with Norman Scott in the 1960s, which was threatening to come out, so, in 1975, he hired an incompetent hitman who lured Scott to a deserted moor and managed only to shoot his dog. Thorpe was forced to resign his leadership when it came out, he was charged with conspiracy to murder, won the case but lost his parliamentary seat. He went on to become Hugh Grant in the acclaimed television version.

A new decade dawned, but the same old chicanery continued. In October 1983, Cecil Parkinson, a Margaret Thatcher favourite, was poised to become Foreign Secretary when it emerged that his former secretary Sara Keays was pregnant with his child.

Womanising had been no bar to power in the Tory party, so Thatcher made him Secretary for Trade and Industry instead, before the revelation came out in the media and Parkinson resigned to spend more time with his wife.

He came back in charge of transport in 1989 but resigned on the same day that his idol, Thatcher, tearfully left Downing Street.

We can’t leave the 1980s without mention of Jeffrey Archer. In 1986, he was Tory Party deputy chairman when it emerged that he’d had a liaison with a prostitute, Monica Coghlan. He denied hanky-panky and sued the Daily Star for libel, winning a £500,000 settlement.

However, 14 years later, Archer was charged with perjury and perverting the course of justice over the evidence he gave in the trial. He was sentenced to four years in prison. Archer went on to become a minor novelist.

The scandals flowed thick and fast in the 1990s. The News of the World, in a typical kiss and tell, exposed Tory minister David Mellor when his former mistress sold the story – complete with the revelation that he liked to wear a Chelsea strip in bed – for £35,000.

Liberal leader Paddy Ashdown, or Pantsdown as The Sun dubbed him when they exposed him for an affair, admitted his misdemeanours then went on to become a baron. He was fluent in Mandarin and several other languages, which is not relevant but interesting.

The defenestration of Tory MP Jonathan Aitken was more serious. It involved an arms deal scam with the Saudis which the Guardian newspaper and Granada’s World In action programme revealed.

He sued for libel, it went the same way as the Archer case and he went down for 18 months on the same charges as Jeffrey.

Peter Mandelson, the Labour fixer and Cabinet minister, was twice forced to resign in scandals which tied the 1990s to the next decade. He had been given a large loan, £373,000, from another Labour grandee which he did not declare in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Mandelson resigned from Government but returned 10 months later as Northern Ireland Secretary.

But just months after that, in 2001, he resigned from Government once more over accusations he had used his position to influence a passport application from an Indian businessman.

The new century opened with a slew of incidents and resignations. Edwina Currie revealed that she had previously had an affair with John Major, Liberal frontbench spokesman Mark Oaten went when it came out he had trysts with rent boys, which he blamed on

a midlife crisis.

Labour MP Peter Hain, later also to become a baron, resigned when it emerged he had failed to declare around £100,000 in donations.

Tessa Jowell, a Labour minister, became embroiled in a financial imbroglio involving her husband, who was a corporate lawyer for Silvio Berlusconi. He was charged and convicted in Italy of money laundering and tax fraud but the case eventually fizzled out, as Italian cases involving Berlusconi tend to.

Jowell was accused of a conflict of interest. She became a baroness but died in 2018 from a brain tumour.

The rest of this century finally hit the pits in 2015 when an uncorroborated anecdote about the then Prime Minister David Cameron – in what was known as Piggate – alleged that as part of an initiation ceremony for the Piers Gaveston Society at Oxford University, he “inserted part of his anatomy” in the mouth of a dead pig.

Cameron deigned not to comment as it was beneath him. This is probably not an incident which will feature in any TV review of his time in office, but at least we can hope not.

With the bulk of the century still to come there is still much scope for scandal.