I’M SURE Cambria - and its political editor – will get the blame for this report.
But all I’m doing in penning this attack on Ieuan Wyn Jones, Plaid group leader and deputy first minister, is repeating the words from the Liberal Democrat briefing this morning.
Kirsty Williams, the Lib Dem group leader, asked whether Mr Jones was capable of continuing to hold his alternative job as minister for the economy.
The reason she gave was not political. It was because she said he could not manage his workload.
She took her evidence from a freedom of information answer – the percentage of his letters which he answered within the official target of 17 working days. His figure was only 72 pc, compared with figures of over 90 per cent for other ministers with relatively-allied responsibilities.
Ms Williams, AM for Brecon and Radnor, said, “The head of the department that is responsible for the well-being of our economy doesn’t seem to be responding to the economic downturn in Wales.
“If Welsh businesses treated their customers this poorly, they wouldn’t last long. The First Minster’s mantra of agile government for fragile times should be more like agile government in fragile times.”
Ms Williams then goes on to claim that “some Labour AMs even question whether he is capable of holding both economy and transport portfolios while being Deputy First Minister”.
It isn’t, of course, Mr Jones who pens the actual answers to the public; he merely signs on a dotted line put before him by his civil servants. But it is he who agrees the line to be taken. Ms Williams wonders whether he is taking far too long in deciding what the lines should be.
Shades, indeed, of Alun Michael when he was First Secretary in the months after the Assembly first opened 10 years ago. The jokes that went around then about Mr Michael taking care to pile neatly the paper-clips undoubtably played some small role in his early departure and replacement by Rhodri Morgan.
