Elin shows a leg down the Bay
When rural affairs minister Elin Jones puts her leg up on a table after a briefing, things are obviously perking up down Cardiff Bay.
But she was just showing off her sensible walking shoes, in response to an earlier query from a female journalist.
Ms Jones is rapidly developing as one of the most confident members of the cabinet. Not because of the leg issue, but because of her ability, confidence, and general humour.
“Thank you for your very interesting series of questions on non-governmental issues,” she said at the close of the weekly press briefing given by a cabinet minister, which she had just hosted.
Usually, the relevant minister attempts to interest us in a very long boring list of his colleagues’ engagements. When Ms Jones mentions no more than a couple, and then beams at us, she is virtually demanding that we ask about Alun Cairns – to which she cheekily responds, “I do not wish to contribute to public discussion.”
She equally cheekily complains there is no picture of her in the Western Mail farming supplement – before welcoming her replacement by a close relative.
And in replying about the effect of the Irish rejection of the Lisbon Treaty on the future of the European Union, she remarked she will be a government representative at the farming Council of Ministers in Luxembourg, where she expected to be in the middle of a host of demonstrations – not against herself, you understand.
She then quietly returned to cabinet business … and showed how she is rapidly tying the largely-English Badger Trust (the friends of bTB) in a knot by talking about her plans to cull badgers, and then of the help she will receive from the RSPCA.
From her comments, it seems Ms Jones is more on top of the problem than are the trust and the badger-lovers.
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