'Joke'

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After years of agonising hard work stuck behind a desk, an Assembly press officer decides - finally - to give it all up and have one go at a long-held dream. To become an acrobat at the circus.

Approaching Billy Smart, the Assembly press officer makes the pitch. "I want to be an acrobat. It's all I've ever wanted to do. I'm fed up with my current job. Can I come and be an acrobat in your circus?".

Mr Smart eyes the press officer up and down. "An acrobat, you say?", he enquires. "It's a difficult job, you know. Not just anybody can do it. How flexible are you?".

"Flexible?", replies the Assembly press officer. "Well, I can't do anything after five".

First Macintosh

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Walking through the thronging masses attending the Wales - New Zealand game on Saturday, a friend alongside me, a journalist for a Scottish newspaper, spotted one man shambling towards us, all alone, clad in a battered red raincoat and with his hands dug deep into his pockets.

"Isn't that Rhodri Morgan?," asked my friend. And indeed it was.

"You don't see Jack McConnell wandering around Edinburgh on his own," he mused. "Certainly not wearing a filthy old mac."

PS Another odd Jack McConnell story will have to wait until tomorrow, when I can work out how to get pictures from a digital camera onto this thing.

why is persuasion a good tittle jane Austen

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One of the wonders of the information superhighway is that you can find out not only how many people have been looking at your blog, but how they found it - ie exactly what Google search led them there. Looking at some of the searches that have sent people this way recently would suggest there's people doing some very odd research out there...

You can also find out where people have searched from and, in some cases, their organisation. Hello Wales Office! Hello BBC!

Here's the Top 10 searches that led people this way in the couple of weeks or so:

1 why is persuasion a good tittle jane Austen
2 "this ole house" "got no windows"
3 Hayley Cropper press coverage
4 "terence grange" freemasonry
5 "carl sargeant" homosexuality
6 "lisa francis" "homosexuality"
7 "leanne wood" homosexuality (there's a running theme here...)
8 "cathy owens" rugby (searched from Italy, bizarrely)
9 leanne wood outspoken
10 what weighs 45 tons

Disingenuous

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David Frost suggested the invasion of Iraq had been "pretty much of a disaster".

Tony Blair said: "It has".

A Downing Street spokeswoman says: "To portray it as some kind of admission is completely disingenuous".

Spin spin sugar

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Just phoned a senior press officer at the National Assembly - who will go unnamed - regarding an article in last weekend's Wales on Sunday I was following up. "Did you see the piece?," I asked.

"No," replied the press officer. "I don't read it."

So some of those responsible for liaising with the press on behalf of the Welsh Assembly Government don't read the only national Sunday newspaper in Wales. Poor show.

"Exceptional levels of care"

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Prescoed, the Monmouthshire open prison with a special emphasis on the word "open", has been named one of the best in England and Wales today. It is one of six to be awarded High Performing Prison status by the Home Office. Director general of the Prison Service Phil Wheatley says:

“The high performing establishments highlighted this year fully deserve this recognition. They are delivering exceptional levels of care and support for some of the most difficult and vulnerable people in society, all the time looking to further improve the way they work."

For a quick background on the exceptional levels of care and support provided by HMP Prescoed, look here, here and here.

Tom Lehrer gave up political satire when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger in 1973. I feel similar.

Vorsicht! Koalitionsgefahr!

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Just returned from a few days in Berlin where, among other things, enjoyed coffee in the Bundestag (as appears the wont for Welsh journalists these days) with Mark Speich, the CDU's director of strategy policy planning and the man who was at the heart of drawing up the Grand Coalition of the CDU and SPD just about managing to stay together in the German government at the moment.

As someone with experience in putting an awkward coalition together, his thoughts may prove interesting to those in the Welsh Tory party interested in forming a rainbow coalition with Plaid and the Lib Dems next year. For, it seems, getting into bed with those to the left has proved a hard pill for the German conservatives' natural supporters to swallow.

Despite the coalition's achievements - unemployment dropping by nearly half a million in the last year, agreement finally being reached on welfare tax reform - the CDU is flatlining in the polls at 35% and is hemorrhaging members at a rate of knots. This, reckons Dr Speich, is down to Conservative voters not liking their politicians mixing with grubby lefties.

"We're losing members and voters in two ways," he says. "Business voters have certainly inclined to the FDP. And we're losing voters who are conservative in the classic sense.

"That's quite natural that we have problems to appeal to these two groups. We have to move away from them to get into coalition with the SDP. To abandon these groups is a natural progess in a grand coalition. The business wing is leaving us for the FDP. The conservative part is leaving us to become non-voters. That's a tremendous problem but rather a natural problem for a situation like a grand coalition."

Those chasing the rainbow coalition - you know who you are - take note!

Everyday is like Sundays

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Writing up what's in tomorrow's Sundays is a slightly futile operation since, by the time anyone reads this, they're liable to have read the papers anyway. But it's 9.54 on a Saturday night, it's all very quiet and I've run out of Sarah Silverman clips on YouTube to watch, so here goes.

Rather like Sunderland South in a general election, the Sunday Telegraph is always the first to declare. Their splash brings glad tidings/apocalyptic news (depending on your take on it) that British shoppers will soon be able to buy cut-price alcohol and cigarettes from the continent without leaving home, "as a result of an extraordinary legal test case that threatens to blow a multi-billion pound hole in the Treasury’s coffers". The Observer says Church of England leaders want doctors to be given the right to withhold treatment from seriously disabled newborn babies in exceptional circumstances.

The Sunday Express says that "John Reid last night dramatically put himself back in the frame to take over from Tony Blair". Writing "last night" when something palpably didn't happen the previous night is one of my pet hates in journalism, by the way. As for John Reid - nah. Conversely, the Sunday Times reports that Gordon Brown plans to become a "terror overlord" once he moves next door, taking "personal charge of the fight against terrorism". The Mail on Sunday goes with a story claiming undercover American agents are "staging secret ‘sting’ operations in Britain against criminal and terrorist suspects they want to extradite to the US."

Both the Daily Star Sunday and the Sunday People go with some nonsense about I'm a Celebrity, while the News of the World reports that Britney Spears "is being held to ransom over an explicit four-hour sex video she made with her dumped hubby" (four hours!).

Much better story in the Sunday Mirror, who report that the multi-millionaire boss of collapsed hamper firm Farepak (whose implosion hit a lot of Welsh families) is already preparing for his own lavish Christmas – "with £500 cases of vintage wine for his mates".

Oh, and Wales on Sunday? That would be telling.

Tory boy

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Alan Bennett once wrote that many people look in the mirror to decide what they're going to be in life.

Craig Williams was always going to be a Conservative politician, really.

Update: Craig gets in touch:
Thanks for the mention on your blog, that picture has caused quite the stir: http://gwenudanfysiau.blogspot.com/2006/11/pam-na-ddwedodd-neb-wrtha-i.html (serve me right, I should have got on my Bike!!!).

Ridiculous

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Just in case you missed this from today's Sun. I only saw the Simon barnet in the flesh, as it were, for the first time a couple of weeks ago. I too found it ridiculous - but then I'm only jealous my days of being able to grow such luscious locks are long gone:

LABOUR backbencher Sion Simon (he of the spoof Cameron video that backfired) has taken a lot of flak in recent weeks for growing his hair long. The Whip is informed that Sion's unclipped locks are styled on the hairdo favoured by the young Gordon Brown in the early 1970s. Sion has misfired again. The Chancellor has seen Sion's hairdo and thinks it is "ridiculous". If Sion wants a job in a Brown government, he needs to get himself to the barber.

Don't Carry On Doctor

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Dr John Marek of the John Marek Party has resigned as chairman of the Assembly’s House Committee this afternoon, although will be staying on as Deputy Presiding Officer.

This is the culmination of his long running dispute with Lord President King Dafydd Elis-Thomas over the way the Assembly will be run next year when the Government of Wales Act kicks in...anyway, the House Committee’s work of overseeing the Assembly’s day-to-day running will be handed to a new Assembly Commission next May...Dr Marek had accused Lord President King of forcing out Assembly Clerk Paul Silk...yada yada yada....you've stopped reading this, haven't you?

Anyway, the expert analysis: Lord President King Dafydd Elis-Thomas has won, and this matters not a jot to anybody outside the immediate vicinity of the Senedd.

Remember where you read it last.

Quote of the day

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The great American TV presenter Stephen Colbert analyses the results of the US midterm elections:

"Tomorrow you're all going to wake up in a brave new world: a world where the constitution gets trampled by an army of terrorist clones, created in a stem-cell research lab run by homosexual doctors who sterilize their instruments over burning American flags."

And they say Americans don't do irony.

"Ah, the auld country! The peat! The peat!"

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No blogging (or column) for a while - been in Ireland. Yes, it was very nice, thanks for asking. But the column returns this Sunday. Gossip and tit-bits to the usual address.