I Nearly Binned a Political Scandal!

I was flicking through some old magazines in my overflowing rack deciding which ones to keep for future reference, and which ones to take down the recycling bank when I came across the April-May edition of Cambria.

In the magazine I found an article that I had read and forgotten about by Wales' Archdruid of political journalism Clive Betts. To be in the April-May edition the article was probably written in mid March. Betts mentions the 28-day rule for electing a First Minister and goes on to say:

That's plenty of time if the ground for a coalition has already been well prepared.

But it's not enough to fit a Rainbow coalition together. Some Labour sources are now considering the possibility that Rhodri Morgan would see that it is time for him to put Wales, rather than his party first. . . .

. . . A Labour source in the Assembly told Cambria "There is a possibility that a caretaker government would be set up; Rhodri would continue as First Minister with an agreement that he would step down in September. During that time nothing radical would happen; it would be a case of keeping things ticking. At the same time the other parties would be bolting together an administration that would take over"

Note the word source, this isn't a case of Clive gazing into a crystal ball and foreseeing what it turns out is very likely to happen, but something that he was told would happen by somebody in the Labour party (possibly even Morgan himself).

This suggests that we have not reached the present state of play in the Assembly by chance, by accident or by political twists in the tail, as many of us bloggers have thought, but it has come about by an agreement made at least three months ago.

If this is so then the people of Wales have been deceived in an underhand way by all four political parties over the last three weeks - and that is a shocking political scandal.

This scandal raises a number of questions:

Were Peter Black's refusenik blog posts prearranged?

Were the Rainbow Rebels primed?

Why did the Lib Dems and Plaid pull out of talks with Labour so unexpectedly?

Have we all been had?