This week's Spin Doctor

• SO, what next for obscure backbench MP No Job Peter Hain?
There has been much speculation in the past week over what the tikka-tinged former Welsh Secretary, pictured, might do next. Former Conservative AM Glyn Davies thinks he might head for the Assembly and, more specifically, Gwenda Thomas’ Neath seat.
“You heard it here first,” he says. Yes, and last.
So, for the true inside story we turn, as ever, to the Daily Express’ excellent Hickey column, which confidently predicts No Job will, er, defect to the Liberal Democrats.
“It’s obvious he’s not going any further in the Labour Party – but a lot of the causes closest to his heart are ‘liberal’ and he’d find a warm welcome if he crossed the floor,” says the paper’s ‘insider’, who almost certainly does not exist.

• AND so to the latest instalment of Does Chris Bryant Understand Devolution?, our irregular section in which the Labour MP for the Rhondda continues to pose questions in Parliament about issues devolved to the Assembly Government nine years ago.
This week: swimming pools.
“Will the Government consider building more 50m pools and making sure that funding comes from central Government, rather than local government?” asked Mr Bryant, of Sport Minister Gerry Sutcliffe last week. Alas! Such issues have long been devolved to the Assembly.
Still, devolution is a process not an event etc, and we’re sure Mr Bryant will get to grips with it eventually.

• SSSHHH! As they say in showbiz columns when reporting on wicked whispers.
Which AM went over to Parliament last week and thoroughly enjoyed himself in the House of Commons’ Strangers bar so much his MP colleagues have spent the last few days apologising to everyone they meet?
“He abused people to the extent that his MPs have had to go around apologising for him,” says a fellow MP.
“Visitors are allowed into Strangers and are allowed to get p***ed in bars – it’s what they’re for – but there were people in there asking for him to be chucked out.” Hic!

• THE subtitling doesn’t get any better on S4C’s Wednesday night political offering CF99.
Last year we mentioned how Conservative AM Paul Davies had spoken of his fondness for (BBC Welsh Affairs Editor) “Vaughan Roderick’s blowing” (he meant blog).
And last week O.J. Williams, a Tory picked to appear because they needed one who spoke Welsh and Alun Cairns was presumably busy, was translated as calling Assembly Presiding Officer Lord President King Dafydd Elis-Thomas “the press department of the Assembly”.
The job of the press department would be to relentlessly talk up the operation while glossing over its shortcoming, while Dafydd El’s role is to...what? Eh? Oh.

• ANOTHER busy week in the life of Lembit ‘Bow Wow’ Öpik, MP for Montgomeryshire and partner of one-half of chart-averse novelty pop act the Cheeky Girls (below).
Last week Öpik appeared on the London stage playing himself in a musical satire, Blair on Broadway.
Lembit and the actor playing Blair danced on stage to the Cheeky Song before Blair ordered the Liberal Democrat to ‘touch my bum’. Lembit duly did. And yet some people still choose to focus on his personal life and not the work he does in his constituency.

• Perhaps it’s due to Margit Irimia, mother of Lembit’s girlfriend Gabriela.
In an interview last week, Margit divulged she had December 6 marked on the calendar on her refrigerator.
It was, she says, “the first night they made love together. That’s what Gabriela said. I asked her if she was happy. She said: ‘I was never so happy in my life.’” And amen to that.