Category Archives: Carwyn Jones

Easy mistake

Posted on May 21, 2010 | Leave a comment

Apologies for the light blogging of late, but life has been rather hectic over the past seven days.

Yesterday evening, after driving back from London, I attended the annual dinner of the North Wales CBI at the St David’s Park hotel, Ewloe.  There were a number of extremely good speeches, including one by my friend Jeremy Salisbury, the CBI’s current chairman, who gave a summary of what the organisation was looking to the new Government to do for business.  On the whole, he gave the coalition a reasonably warm welcome.

The principal speaker was the Welsh First Minister, Carwyn Jones, who delivered a good speech, including an entertaining account of his experiences canvassing in South Wales during the general election campaign.

I was particularly amused when he related a story of knocking on the door of a house in Bridgend to be greeted by a lady who said she was absolutely delighted to see him, because she watched him on television every night.

“Every night?” enquired Carwyn, perplexed.  “I’m on TV quite a bit, but not that often.”

“Oh, aren’t you the BBC Wales weatherman?” asked the lady, clearly very disappointed.

I was pleased to learn that I am not the only one to have noted the resemblance.

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Posted in Carwyn Jones, general election

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Welsh Labour in denial

Posted on February 14, 2010 | 1 Comment

Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones appeared on the Andrew Marr Show this morning.

When it was put to him by Marr, quite correctly, that Wales was more badly affected by the recession than any other part of the country, Jones pooh-poohed the criticism, saying that “the figures were not that bad”.

Actually, the figures are very bad indeed; Wales is the poorest part of the UK and it would have been better for Mr Jones to own up to it and say what he proposes to do about it. 

It would appear, however, that, like Peter Hain, Mr Jones is another Labour politician who believes that so long as Wales is doing better than Rwanda, everything in the garden is rosy.

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Posted in Carwyn Jones, Labour Party, Peter Hain

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Nuclear reactors

Posted on October 25, 2009 | Leave a comment

There must be something about the sea air on Anglesey: it miraculously turns even the most hardened opponent of nuclear power into an enthusiast for a new generating station at Wylfa.

The Damascene conversion of Plaid Cymru’s Welsh Assembly leader, Ieuan Wyn Jones, is already well known.  Plaid Cymru is deeply anti-nuclear; its 2009 Euro manifesto confirmed its “total opposition to the construction of any new nuclear power stations in Wales” and its Assembly spokeswoman, Leanne Wood, declared in a plenary debate in September, 2007, that:

“Plaid Cymru, under all circumstances, will oppose any future proposal to locate a new nuclear power station at Wylfa”. 

Mr Jones was accordingly very much out of step with his own party when, in January 2008, he enthusiastically welcomed the Government’s announcement of its commitment to a new generation of nuclear power stations as “good news”. 

Mr Jones admittedly is the Assembly member for Anglesey, and Wylfa is a major employer there, but nevertheless it is rather odd to see a party leader putting his name to a manifesto policy which he manifestly considers to be a load of old cobblers.

Now Carwyn Jones has also experienced the Wylfa effect.

Mr Jones is one of three candidates for the leadership of the Labour group in the Welsh Assembly.  He visited Anglesey yesterday as part of his campaign tour and announced that, as the debate on nuclear energy had “shifted considerably”, he now believed that “nuclear power will form part of Wales’s low-carbon response to the serious challenges we face in the years to come”.

Mr Jones’s dramatic turnabout will, I am sure, please the local MP, Albert Owen, who is staunchly pro-nuclear and has put his name to Mr Jones’s nomination papers.

It may, however, be less pleasing to another of his sponsors, the Welsh environment minister, Jane Davidson.  Ms Davidson has always strongly adhered to the official Assembly Government line (to which Mr Jones is still nominally committed) of opposition to new nuclear development in Wales.  Only two months ago, she demanded a public inquiry into the Government’s proposals for Wylfa B “on the grounds of concern over the safety and security of the management of future nuclear waste”.

Ms Davidson may now be wondering whether she has backed the right man.  Perhaps she, too, should take a trip up to Anglesey and breathe the balmy Wylfa air.

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Posted in Albert Owen, Carwyn Jones, Ieuan Wyn Jones, Labour Party, Leanne Wood, nuclear power, Plaid Cymru, Welsh Assembly Government

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Carwyn Jones is not lazy

Posted on August 18, 2009 | 1 Comment

Carwyn JonesMr Carwyn Jones, who is Counsel General in the Welsh Assembly Government, is fancied by some – not least himself – as the most likely successor to Rhodri Morgan as leader of the Assembly’s Labour group when the old maestro finally hangs up his boots and heads for what we all hope will be a happy and lengthy retirement contemplating the sun setting over Cardigan Bay.

However, Mr Jones has a few rivals for the job: Huw Lewis, the radical intellectual from Merthyr Tydfil; the courteous and honest-to-goodness Jane Hutt; and Edwina Hart (see this blog passim), who is probably Mr Jones’s biggest threat, given that, importantly, she appears to have the support of the unions and he doesn’t. 

Mr Jones also has an unfortunate reputation, as Betsan Powys has noted, for laziness, although I am sure that it is wholly undeserved.

Mr Jones consequently needs to up his profile a bit – no, a lot – and it is noticeable that of late his activity has increased considerably.  In May, he gave a lecture entitled Getting the Devolution Dividend; Legal Wales in the Next Ten Years to Cardiff University Law School.  Earlier this month, he delivered a speech at the national Eisteddfod warning – correctly – that Labour can no longer rely on its core vote in Wales.  He has even started blogging.

Oh, and today, he decided to have a pop at me.

This afternoon, I had a telephone call from the Western Mail’s Martin Shipton.  He told me that Carwyn Jones had telephoned him to say that he had been surfing the web and had discovered that I was a member of the Cornerstone group of Conservative MPs, one of whose number had published an article some time ago that was critical of the National Health Service.  What, asked Martin, had I to say to that?

The following, I replied:

  1. I was formerly a member of Cornerstone, but had left it a couple of years ago.  The fact that I was still listed as a member was news to me;
  2. My stance on the NHS was well known; I had even blogged about it recently.  The NHS certainly needed improvement, but it was still a system I supported;
  3. Why didn’t Carwyn Jones get a life?

Martin thanked me in his usual courteous way and told me he would write the story up as the sort of inter-party row that is manna to political journalists in the month of August.

So there we are: Carwyn Jones has shown that he isn’t lazy, after all.  He is fully capable of surfing the internet single-handed and of telephoning a journalist without assistance.

But I have a gentle word of advice for Mr Jones:  remember that I’m not the enemy.  I’m just the opposition.

The real enemy is Edwina Hart and I’m afraid that, at the moment, she’s several streets ahead of you in the leadership stakes.

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Posted in Carwyn Jones, Trivia

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