From Ron Davies’s ’moment of madness ’ to the Lib-Lab pact the new Welsh Assembly has had fraught beginnings. Patrick Hannan scrutinises the sagas of Ron and Alun and Rhodri and Rod, placing them in the complicated context of the organisations and people who set the agenda of public life in Wales.

The humiliating failure of Labour’s attempts to control Wales from London; Plaid Cymru’s anti-independence stance; inter-party manoeuvring in the Assembly; trouble for the Welsh establishment at its club; increasing difficulties for the monarchy: these are the strands which make the state of Wales. This is a compelling story about both Wales and Britain, and one which, as Hannan discovers, is also richly comic