You don’t have to be a super strategist to know that the reported comments by Plaid leader Darren Price will set a few backsides twitching over at Lib Dem central.
His description of the administration as “particularly vulnerable” is not exactly the sort of thing that Chris Holley & Co want to hear from someone they thought had been neutered by concessions on Welsh medium schooling, a string of local issues and even, it is rumoured, post-16 school transport.
But they have only themselves to blame for thinking that the whispered approach used to recruit the likes of June Stanton, Sylvia Lewis and Keith Morgan would bear fruit instead of the nationalist wrath it actually incurred.
In this instance, the hang-up for the Lib Dems is not just that the rump coalition no longer offers the same appeal or sense of security. The real problem is that no-one actually wants to become associated with the list of shortcomings so ably recounted by their own schizophrenic spin-site just the other day.
Even those left in the “super-group” admit it is just a matter of time before remaining allies begin to hanker after the non-aligned independence they vaunted prior to the last elections (and before the real possibility of rewards without responsibility appeared on the agenda).
The Cabinet’s inner circle still think that the alliance has the cohesion to see things out until May when the wheeling & dealing that precedes annual meetings can be sorted out amicably.
They could be right. The cronyism that is the glue which holds the coalition together may not be about to come unstuck just yet.
But the Lib Dem coat-tails really aren’t what they were – and as somebody else put it the other day, “the public’s perception of the Swansea Administration is not so much lame duck as a dead duck”.
Interesting times indeed.
...and bye bye Brian
3 weeks ago
