I wonder who in his party’s hierarchy pounced on David Jones, MP for Clwyd West and previously AM for North, for his blogged comments that he would have been rather sunning himself in a London park that drudging through the minutiae of an Assembly measure at Westminster.
He’s now given a sort-of apology.
In the press gallery in Cardiff, we all had good feelings for the replacement for the honourable Rod Richards. We knew that in one way at least they were very similar – in their scepticism (to put it mildly) about the Assembly. But David kept rigidly to the party line sent across the chamber by Rod’s successor as party leader, Nick Bourne, and kept his true feelings to himself.
His current feelings about the light weight of too much Assembly legislation is shared, indeed, by several AMs – on the Tory benches, and no doubt elsewhere.
But who is to blame for the weakness of the Assembly; who spent numerous hours, no doubt, dreaming up a constitutional settlement that is so appalling in its architecture that it will have to be radically widened as soon as practicable ?
Why has Wales free museum entry, free pensioner bus passes, and so on ? Not because they are necessarily wonderful policies, but because past Welsh cabinets spent so long searching for the gaps they could espy in the legislative competences allowed to Wales which would permit policy changes that resonated with the general electorate.
In other words, blame Labour in London for the mess, in particular Welsh MPs.
And I think it’s a bit grand for David to blame Labour’s special advisers for Gwenda Thomas’s press release.
I am sure Gwenda has much better things to do than read the honourable member’s verbal outpourings. That’s the job of Transport House in Cathedral Road – and it’s their new press officer who put out the press release.
Quite a few of us in the Assembly believe that there’s only way that the Cardiff mess will get sorted out – by the next Tory cabinet who, faced with an opposing legislature in Cardiff, will decide that the only way to keep the union together is by avoiding conflict through giving Wales near-federal powers, like the Scots.
