And he is supposed to have added: "This is the age-old problem of the BBC not being truly representative of Great Britain and, as usual, it is the Welsh and the Scots who are largely ignored."It so happens that, these days, being Scottish or Welsh is an immense asset should you want to be a TV or radio presenter. There, surrounded by pictures of Des Lynam and Jill Dando, was a story claiming that anger was growing outside England at the preponderance of English presenters who would be fronting this event.Tam Dalyell MP was cross, while admitting that he hadn't even heard of Jill Dando, but the longest, most newsworthy comments came from our Rhodri. I was grateful, but slightly nonplussed.And that was also how I felt this weekend when I opened my Sunday newspaper and discovered a fairly typical "what-the-hell-do-we-put-on-page-10?" spread about the BBC's planned programming on the first day of the new millennium. This feels a harsh thing to say about a man who is so popular with the Westminster press corps. When I was - briefly - a parliamentary sketch writer at the House, Rhodri Morgan was one of the few MPs who used regularly to telephone me and my colleagues with some droll tale that we might have liked to follow up For my part, all too often, I couldn't quite see the joke. His features are sharp where Morgan's are craggy; his tones flat where Morgan's are musical; his pronouncements are boring and careful, while Morgan's are exciting and a bit...The word, I think, is "silly".

We simply note that Morgan's Blairite opponent, Alun Michael - the current Welsh Secretary - lacks hwyl. If you wanted an eisteddfod opened, Rhodri would appear to be your man. But then, we English have not really been following the Welsh debate, nor will we have to live with the consequences. As a personality he seems an altogether natural choice (to an untutored English eye) for the Welsh Labour Party to pick as its candidate for the post of the first- ever Welsh First Minister. At night he probably meets under Llareggub hill and declaims with Butcher Beynon and the Reverend Eli Jenkins. The markets can, as biotech and technology stocks show, take a long view. But for many smaller companies it is unfortunate that the stock market is becoming a more and more exclusive club..

RHODRI MORGAN is every educated Englishman's idea of what a Welshman should be like. The MP is dark, his eyebrows are bushy, his voice is mellifluous and rarely silent; bardic blood can easily be imagined to be coursing through his veins. When those who do know the true value of their concerns - often the existing management - see a bargain, then they buy their company from a neglectful stock market. But there is a price - the end of access to a cheap source of capital.Generally, the world's stock markets are efficient ways of raising money.

A cycle soon sets in.The market does have a correcting mechanism. But the gap in performance between the bigger and smaller companies has been growing at an alarming rate for some time. The bull market has passed many firms by This suggests a degree of market failure. Teams of researchers watch big firms' fortunes - and some smaller companies in trendy sectors such as the Internet - like hawks. Unfashionable smaller companies are under-researched, and thus under-bought They then underperform and look even less interesting. It is only to be expected that, pushed ahead by a wave of globalising mega-mergers, the larger companies' share prices will outperform those of smaller ones. The main problem faced by smaller companies listed on the London International Stock Exchange is that they are a big yawn for the big institutional investors. It is not the first, and will certainly not be the last, smaller enterprise to de-list This tendency has been growing.

So Rebus is a significant story for what it tells us about the state of our capital markets. But the point about Rebus is precisely that it is, relatively, insignificant. A COMPANY named Rebus is casting off its London Stock Exchange listing: this modest computer services firm will be "going private" The news is unlikely to make much of a splash. But in the end the most important development was the one reinforced yesterday: the move from prescribing care for a whole community to caring for the individual needs of some of the most valuable, resourceful, responsible and vital members of our society.. The legal status of carers has been established; Invalid Care Allowance is to be paid to married women; council tax concessions have been granted. The provision of pounds 140m to allow carers to take a break is not much, shared between 6 million people.