The great men of Tower

Like most people who have lived or worked in Wales at some point, I was sad to hear about the closure of Tower Colliery, the last deep mine in the principality. It's a story that has a particular poignancy for me because I was covered the mine's initial closure as a reporter on the South Wales Echo in 1994, as well as the subsequent triumphant campaign to reopen it.

Tyrone O'Sullivan, the South Wales NUM leader turned mine owner, was a top contact during the whole saga and is one of the few people I met in my career in journalism whom I would describe as a genuinely great man. The story was later included in a special publication called Heroes of Coal which is still the single piece of work of which I am proudest in my whole career.

The 270 men of Tower who sank their £8,000 redundancy cheques into keeping the mine open will now share the proceeds of the sale of the land at Hirwaun for redevelopment. I hope they get top dollar - they deserve it.

The story everyone missed

Or maybe it was the story the government buried, I'm not quite sure. But amid all the excitement of the Hain resignation, the fact that Nu Lab has once again appeared to knock electoral reform on the head has inevitably received little attention.

I'll be saying a lot more about this in my weekend column in The Journal, which will be posted on Behind the Lines at some point tomorrow, but I have to say this goes down as a major, major missed opportunity by Gordon, both in terms of his attempts to restore trust in the political system, and in terms of positioning his party ahead of an election which in my view has hung Parliament written all over it.

Yesterday's announcement from Justice Minister Michael Wills stated that the review of electoral systems across the UK had found that voters in Scotland and Wales were "confused" by proportional representation, and ruled out its introduction for Westminster.

This was one of the areas where I and many others hoped that Brown would display more radicalism than had been the case with Tony Blair. Slowly, inexorably, those hopes are fading.

Gordon goes for youth

Gordon's first enforced reshuffle is now almost complete and it is clear he won't be doing either of the things that I urged in my previous post - abolishing the almost-meaningless post of Welsh Secretary along with the other territorial posts, and bringing back a heavyweight from the Blair years to bolster his flagging administration.

Instead, he seems to have taken the opportunity to underline one of the key themes that marked his first attempt at Cabinet-making last July - that we are now in the throes of the transition from one Labour generation to the next.

James Purnell, Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper, the three main beneficiaries of today's changes, are all in their 30s. All have been spoken about at one time or another as potential leaders of the party, and to paraphrase Tony Blair, clearly they are the future now.

Brown had the opportunity to bring back Alan Milburn, or David Blunkett, or Charles Clarke, and he passed on it. It means they are almost certainly now not returning to the Cabinet table.

I know very little about Andy Burnham, and I am indifferent to the charms of James Purnell, but Yvette Cooper is someone I have always rated highly. Regular readers of this blog will know that I regard her as the premier politician in the Balls household, and the likeliest to make it to the top of the greasy pole.

It is reasonably well-known that Blair spitefully delayed her promotion to the Cabinet as a way of getting back at Ed Balls, but what is less well-known is that her early career in government was hampereed by chronic fatigue syndrome. To successfully come back from that is no mean feat in itself.

The predictable choice of 59-year-old retread Paul Murphy to the Welsh Office appears to fly in the face of the accent on youth, but it just may be the case that this is intended to be a relatively short-term appointment.

I still believe that a restructuring of the territorial posts into a "Department for Devolution" is on the cards at some point, if only for the reason that the current situation is pretty indefensible.

A couple of other aspects of the reshuffle have thus far passed relatively unnoticed, so I shall briefly mention them. Stephen Timms, a member of the Blair Cabinet who was unaccountably excluded by Brown, returns in Caroline Flint's old role of Pensions Minister.

And finally....there's a new role in the Cabinet Office for blogger Tom Watson, the man who once said he would never return to government, although it later became clear he was taking the michael.