HUW LEWIS seems to have made a bit of a fool of himself by attacking Cambria Politico over a blog one of my colleagues wrote about his bid for the Labour leadership, writes Clive Betts from the Assembly press gallery.
Even within his own group he lacks the backing he no doubt considers his due for his attempted legal action against an organ of the much-disliked press.
A moderate within the group pointedly refused to defend the Merthyr and Rhymni AM.
Mr Lewis had taken rather violent objection to being lampooned as “Screwloose” – he claimed that the comment stated that he was insane.
When I had been challenged last week by Mr Lewis’s paid staff about the Screwloose blog, I had gently argued that the term was hardly a statement about Mr Lewis’s mental state. Rather it was a pretty standard lampoon.
But that was brushed aside.
My middle-of-the-road contact was in agreement with me about the meaning of the errant word. That person had in fact no quick answer to my jibe that the storm over “screwloose” had a lot to say about about Mr Lewis’s own mental state – by which I do not mean that he was mad in any way whatsoever.
Rather his mental state is that incurred by being on the anti-further devolution side of the argument with his own Labour Party.
If you want chapter and verse, turn to the May edition of Cambria last year where Patrick McGuinness wrote a long article dissecting the current state of Welsh Labour, its policy failures and its deep dichotomy over Assembly powers.
In the following issue Mr Lewis, very intemperently, attacked Mr McGuinness for his article which, he said, is “shot through with factual inaccuracies, crude insinuation and petty name-calling it would, as the cliché goes, be funny were it not so offensive”.
Mr Lewis’s letter then stormed on to do no less than back up the very basis of Mr McGuinness’s arguments. That is, that Welsh Labour is setting in for a period of most-serious decline. Which is precisely what I had written only a couple of pages earlier in that same edition of Cambria.
I can quite understand why Plaid Cymru secretly hope that Mr Lewis will win. It will make two things much easier for that party. Firstly, in helping to enable Plaid’s political advance in Wales. And secondly, in underlining and continuing Labour’s continuing failure in Wales.
If Huw has any “screwloose”, it is surely because of the difficulty he is facing in dealing with that decline.
We can all remember the old Communist Party. Of GB, no less. Happenings in the rest of the world left them politically stranded. Except that, as the party got smaller, they became increasing sure that they were the only people who were right (oh, I mean “left”).
Not that the CP of B (they’ve dropped the Great, for what I would consider obvious reasons) doesn’t contain some fine politicians who are always worth talking to.
Rather as Huw is.
