In all the comment about Plaid’s performance in the elections, Caerffili has been almost ignored.

Certainly, it’s significant that Plaid lost Gwynedd – but as the seats went to another lot of Nats, there’s not much difference politically.

Far more important is what happened in the Valleys. From the insignificant mention in Plaid’s main comment on their election performance, you might have thought a couple of extra seats had come their way.

In fact, Plaid is almost certain to take control. And that should have been obvious to Ty Gwynfor last Thursday at 10pm. The brighter parts of the party hierarchy knew that a coalition with the resident Independents had been in negotiation for months.

All it needed was for Ron Davies – father of the activist sort of devolution that sometimes seems to be disappearing – to win in Bedwas, Trethomas and Machen. He topped the poll there, closely followed by colleague Colin Hobbs.

So Plaid will retake control of the council which they turned into one of the best run in Wales- although to be fair to them, Labour didn’t really let things slip in their time in control.

All Plaid will have to start to remember is that the party locally remember that Plaid is NOT primarily a vote-getting machine, but that it possesses a principle or two. One of them is that Welsh is the ancestral language of Wales – and that poetry was being written in Welsh not much more than a century ago addressed at occasionally-monoglot locals : for instance, a doggerel dealing with Piccadilly. Not in London, but the current five-way road junction and pub just north of the town centre.

Sometimes one wonders whether Plaid in Gwynedd and Caerffili are the same people.

There’s something to be said for politicians being honest about the promises they will deliver when they get elected.

Plaid’s loss of control of Gwynedd County Council – over the closure of some of the primary schools with which the county is over-provisioned for the number of children born – may soon link up with another issue with which Plaid Cymru has historically been associated.

That is the Welsh language – and in particular the election promise which everyone understood would lead to the launch of a daily newspaper in that language. The issue of the schools and Y Byd (the putative name of the paper, which pushed the issue into the political limelight) are not really linked; but they are close enough to raise issues about the honesty of politicians.

We can leave the schools issue to Gwynedd’s newly-elected councillors and talks between Plaid (minus their group leader Richard Parry Hughes and councillor-cum-national president Dafydd Iwan) and Llais Gwynedd, odds-and-sods Independents, Labour and the Lib Labs. I am pretty sure the issue is not as clear cut as a quick glance at the election results would seem to indicate.

But the issue of Y Byd (shorthand for a daily paper, whoever starts it) is likely to run and run. Not in the public bar, perhaps, but in the more important bar of public opinion.

When I wrote in the last Cambria, I used the information to hand at the time. Some of that ‘gen was not quite correct. The small-sized extra grant for publications had been decided long enough ago for it to have been inserted in the budget – at £200,000-a-year, one third of that necessary.

On the face of it, Labour objectors were not to blame for the small figure. The not-insubstantial figure of Huw Lewis (Merthyr and Rhymney AM) would not have objected too much to even £1m (although he possessed doubts on other grounds).

Early in the autumn, senior Plaid figures discussed and agreed a civil service paper on the suitably-vague issue of Welsh-language publications mentioning the £200,000 figure.

I don’t know why the figure was so small (did Labour somehow force it that low ?). Neither why Plaid accepted the figure (were the individuals in that meeting unaware of how much was really needed ?).

Perhaps I will write more in the next Cambria.

My feeling that the issue will run comes from the editorial in the two-monthly magazine Planet. Some will say that Ned Thomas, the leader of the Byd, had too much influence in that leader (he was Planet’s founder).

But the editorial’s careful wording fits far too much with some ugly anti-comments on the Byd project by two party leaders at Plaid’s spring conference in Newport to be allowed to pass.

Planet talks of “enmities within parties”. The editor also ridicules Adam Price, MP, one of Plaid’s most sensible voices, for his over-espousal of the internet. Newspapers, some more than others (the Llandudno Daily Post is apparently doing pretty well) are suffering circulation-wise. Some web-nuts believe the last edition of a United States daily will on current trends be published in 2044 (unfortunately, I’m unlikely to be around to have the last laugh).

More important is whether politicians’ promises are to be believed. As I wrote last month, I don’t think this would have happened if Plaid had joined the rainbow coalition…