Don Touhig was always the exemplar of champagne socialism. After twenty years as a Councillor he was rewarded with a safe seat in Westminster, and after a few years made a clear profit of about £200,000 from selling his second home there, a home which had been funded by the taxpayer. Plenty to celebrate.
Don Touhig didn't do a particularly bad job as MP for Islwyn. He was generally competent, a backbencher who touched the fringes of government but was quietly dropped. No different from many other MPs. But he's now decided not to contest the seat again, and he gave his reasons in this interview:
Hold on a moment! Click back to 1:55 and notice how he described his job:
The public at large—if I walk down Blackwood High Street—are more interested in jobs, the economy, health, education, care of their elderly parents ... these are the bread and butter issues that I come here to argue on behalf of the people of Islwyn.
This tells us rather more than he intended about why he never quite made it. He goes to Westminster to represent his constituents on "health, education and care of their elderly parents" does he?
Health, education and pretty much everything to do with care of the elderly are devolved issues. If he really did spend so much of his time trying to get answers on these issues he'd only have been told—politely at first, but more pointedly as the years went on—that it was AMs in the Assembly who had been elected to do that job.
Who knows, perhaps that's why he was so peeved at the creation of the Assembly. It took away his sense of importance. Note the emphasis he put on the word "I" in the quote. Or perhaps he's spent the last eleven years of his parliamentary career in a perpetual state of denial ... refusing to accept that there was an Assembly and going round the departments of Whitehall insisting that ministers with responsibility for things like health and education only in England should treat the residents of Islwyn as a special case.
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And the same trademark refusal to accept reality would also explain why, when asked about possible involvement in the referendum campaign, he shook his head and muttered "What No campaign?" followed by a rather too emphatic "I've no idea what anybody's talking about."
Perhaps it is better to leave people with the impression that you are a political dimwit who doesn't have a clue about what is happening in Wales. What's the alternative? You wouldn't want people to think that you were lying through your teeth, would you?
But time will soon tell us whether you were.
