JONES THE POLITICIAN

“HE MUST BE IMPORTANT, MR BLACKADDER,” states Baldrick about the young idiot King George II, “he is the Prince of Wales.” “Have you ever been to Wales, Baldrick?” is Blackadder’s response, followed by, “Well, don't. It's a ghastly place. Huge gangs of sinewy men roam the valleys terrorising people with their close-harmony singing. You need half a pint of phlegm in your throat just to pronounce the place names. Never ask for directions in Wales, Baldrick. You'll be washing spit out of your hair for a fortnight.”

THE SUCCESSFUL TV SERIES “BLACKADDER” is not the only modern TV show to find easy humour in ridiculing the Welsh, but few people know about the chronicles of Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, who set out from Chester in AD 59 to subdue the Welsh after the natives had become restless. On his Cerrigydrudion campaign, and during the later subjugation of the Druids as far west as Anglesey, Suetonius fortunately kept a journal in which he described the Welsh: “The Ordovices seem not to possess fixed residences, nor have any sense of established order. (…) They live on the tops of hills, basically in the open air, with their possessions scattered about them. They rush down upon our troops (…) making loud, guttural, unworldly noises, engage in skirmishes, and then the survivors run away again in any direction.”

THIS DESCRIPTION IS PERFECTLY VALID TO THIS DAY to describe what the Welsh get up to on Friday and Saturday evenings in any of the civilised English towns along the Welsh border, except it nowadays includes getting drunk along the way, resulting in feelings of some disrespect for the Welsh among the more sedentary English.

OUR POLITICIANS, HOWEVER, cannot openly disregard the Principality of Wales, although the monarchy continues to allow its mad male children, like Charles, to be its princes, and even to live there, as in the case of the dullard William. But Westminster would be extremely relieved if it were possible to dig an enormous ditch along Offa’s Dike and push Wales out into St George’s Channel, where it might float off to join Ireland, and the two sets of Celts could babble away to each other to their little hearts’ content in the gargling, throat-clearing tongues they call Gaelic.

THE LATEST ATTEMPT TO GET RID OF WALES was on Thursday, with the referendum on power for the Welsh Assembly. The vote was clearly a “yes”, although by my reckoning 65% “yes” out of a 35% turnout means that only one Welsh resident out of five wants to be governed by fellow Welshman. Whether this is enough for the government in London to tell them to get on with things on their own remains to be seen, but it has led to scenes of unbridled joy among the Joneses.

FIRST MINISTER CARWYN JONES (pictured above) stated that this was a “clear yes across the whole of Wales from the coast to the border”, which is a different spin on my realistic analysis, and Deputy First Minister Ieuan Wyn Jones bizarrely added: "Let's be proud that the nation has spoken with one voice. The rest of the world can now sit up and take notice of a small country.” Somehow I am not sure that “the rest of the world” keeps up with Welsh politics.