Why don't we egg politicians any more?

LAST week I was invited to meet an array of candidates for the new Assembly: my mistake was to think that this was being held in the evening, but it was actually a breakfast bash in a posh hotel.

The main penalty for being late was that breakfast had gone and the meeting was already in progress.

My first impression was what a strange language potential politicians talk these days. They talk about climate change as if they are going to do something about it, when in fact a few less politicians and a lot less bureaucrats would probably achieve far more than endless meetings and conferences.

All they seem to do is compete with each other over just how much of our future energy supplies will be provided from renewable sources.

One candidate even claimed that her (probably substantial) family estate already provided quantities of brushwood to a local paper mill.

Another one even resorted to reading his party manifesto because he probably like me and didn’t understand whether they were talking about windmills or biofuel.

The big yawn: Rhodri Morgan was in Wrexham this week to launch Labour's poster campaign

Never have I known such a boring election campaign. When I has more politically active, we used to go and throw eggs at the Deputy Prime Minister and give these guys a good going over, but unfortunately the protocol of modern times ensures they all more or less agree with each other, even though it has little relation to the world we actually live in.

The main spark of interest was to come later in the day when I visited a farm machinery dealer on Anglesey and the young lad said, with a true glint in his eye: “Well, you’re lucky to have a 5000 these days because there are not many about.”
He was referring to my aged tractor which I rescued from the scrapyard a couple of years ago so that I could amuse myself scraping off rust and painting it.

But perhaps repairing old tractors has more to offer than trying to find out about an election campaign which must go down as one of the most tedious ever.