WITH A Senedd election less than a year away, SMs presumably thought they’d worked out the best way to win friends and influence people.

After all, if it’s votes you’re after, what better than to enter a darkened room from which press and public are firmly barred and hatch a grimy little plan calculated to neatly thwart an annoying new rule stopping them from any longer giving taxpayer-funded jobs to their own families and friends?

That, at any rate, seems to have been the calculation of the Senedd’s four-member standards committee - that’s right, standards as in rules of ethical conduct - who presumably saw this particular gravy-train’s impending encounter with a set of buffers an inconvenience they could have done without.

What’s more, under assault here was a tradition dating from the foundation of the Welsh Assembly 26 years ago, no less. Good jobs, up to £50,000-odd a year, for friends and family. Lovely little earners, all gone.

As Paul McCartney might have put it: “Sister Suzy, brother John, Martin Luther, Phil and Don, brother Michael, Auntie Gin, open the door and let ’em in…” Yeah, and all now left in the lurch.

But there we are, such unwelcome interferences with the cosy, familial ways of the Cardiff Bay clubhouse are sent to try us.

Never mind, though, because what are standards committees for if not to come up with loopholes? And, in this, our ethics arbiters have not disappointed. Labour chair Hannah Blythyn, fellow party member Mick Antoniw, Plaid Cymru’s Peredur Owen Griffiths and the Tories’ Tom Giffard have come up with a cracking escape clause.

Their crafty little recommendation is that while, from next year, when the Senedd expands by a whopping 50 per cent-plus to 96 members, politicians will be no longer be allowed to slot family members and friends into publicly-funded jobs…they will be permitted to employ family and friends of other Senedd members. A master stroke indeed.

In the past, more than 15 of the current 60 Senedd members have employed family members, directly or indirectly. Currently, ten - 16 per cent - do so.

But the ethics experts have gone a step further, suggesting the names of family and friends be withheld from the public register of interests, ostensibly because current beneficiaries have had “unwanted emails and social media messages”. Douglas Bain, the Senedd’s standards commissioner, also recommended omitting names.

Thus, information about politicians’ jobs for family and friends stands to be hidden, despite glaringly clear conflicts of interest.

To cap it all, every meeting held as part of the committee’s inquiry into declarations of interests, property and shares portfolios and thresholds for declaring gifts and hospitality were held behind closed doors - press and public excluded - and many related documents were declared secret.

The current recommendations come in part from SMs with personal experience of the world of familial favours - Blythyn’s wife works for first minister Eluned Morgan, while Owen Griffiths’s wife works for Plaid MS Sioned Williams.

According to records of latest meetings,

neither Blythyn nor Owen Griffiths declared an interest as the committee finalised its recommendations, which will now be considered by the llywydd - Ceredigion SM Elin Jones - by the Senedd’s business committee or by the Senedd as a whole.

Many voters are likely to view these manoeuvrings as evidence of an arrogant and cynical manipulation of the system amounting to corrupt practice. In terms of maintenance of democratic integrity, things can hardly be more serious, and it is easy to imagine that people may take it so badly as to feel disenfranchised.

Part, but only part, of the public’s anger will be that the Senedd has for so long supported a practice which has shown not the slightest awareness that the jobs it has so cosily distributed have been jobs that that should have been offered to the public at large, and that the occupants of these posts are entirely likely to have not been the best people for the roles in question.

Then there is the fact that Wales has lagged behind Westminster so badly and so embarrassingly.

More than eight years ago, in March 2017, the then chair of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA), Ruth Evans, announced that politicians would, from 2020, be barred from using taxpayers’ money to employ relatives and other “connected” people, the practice being “out of step with modern employment practice”. The ruling came after criticism that allowing MPs to hire relatives was unjust and encouraged nepotism.

Damningly, Wales’s parliament has brazenly allow this jobs-for-the-boys routine to sleaze on, even in the light of reform by a Westminster legislature which, following the MPs’ expenses scandal, could boast a reputation which was far from angelic.

MORE EVIDENCE emerges of the dangers of transferring stroke patients huge distances from Bronglais Hospital to Llanelli or Pembrokeshire, as proposed by Hywel Dda health board.

A study by London researchers published in January last year shows that the rate of “functional independence” three months after a stroke was considerably better - 47.4 per cent versus 36 per cent - for stroke patients treated entirely at a ‘mothership’ hospital, as opposed to being treated and transferred to another unit.

The functional outcomes refer to physical function and disability and rates of significant intracerebral bleeding.

A doctor speaking on condition of anonymity tells me: “I cannot believe that we are bringing this sort of news to the health board’s attention at this late stage in a process which has been going on for over a year. To me, that demonstrates a failure of leadership and curiosity within the team, as one of the most basic questions one asks is: ‘What is the evidence?’”

People who haven’t yet responded to the current health board consultation relating to its massively risky plan need to take to their keyboards without delay.