CARWYN JONES has often been accused of being lazy, writes Clive Betts from the Assembly press gallery.
Those of us who have known him for a long time wonder whether that accusation is entirely fair.
And now Lib Dem leader and farmer’s wife Kirsty Williams pointed out that there are TWO Carwyn Joneses.
There is the agriculture minister who was hurled into the job the day before the Royal Welsh Show opened in Builth
Not long after that, the foot-and-mouth crisis descended on Wales. That involved the burning and burial of immense numbers of animal carcases.
This period of high feelings saw the minister rushing across Wales dealing with crises left, right and centre. In the heights of the Brecon Beacons, it also saw a driverless tractor hurtling down towards him … why or how we have never been told.
Ms Williams said the farming industry had noticed the two different Carwyns. The first was lively and energetic. That individual lasted for about two years.
But then things slipped back. That was when people started describing him as lazy.
Ms Williams wondered whether the change came about when Mr Jones got fed up with being stuck in the same specialised ministry. At each cabinet reshuffle – and, to be fair, there haven’t been many – or possibility of a reshuffle, he ended up in the same post.
The Lib Dem leader’s view fits in with the line that Mr Jones mentioned to me once when I was still on the Western Mail – prior to the five years when the “national newspaper of Wales” had NO reporter based at the Assembly.
He told me and the Daily Post reporter that he was getting fed up with the job because there was so little to do. Of course, Mr Jones’s father was not a farmer – which would have meant she had been inbred with the minutiae of agricultural officialdom – but an official for an educational professional association.
Ms Williams also agreed that the serious illness his wife Lisa had suffered – now overcome – may have had an effect on his work attitude.
Ms Williams hopes that her feelings about Mr Jones’s attitude to his job – his current post of Counsel General is also almost a non-post – will be borne out when he takes on the party leadership, and the post of First Minister which goes with it.
The new challenge will, she hopes, reinvigorate him to become like the agriculture minister he was at the beginning.
God help us otherwise, was her attitude.
