Sergeant Wilson, Corporal Jones and the prime minister

"A conference like this doesn't just happen," David Jones told his audience.

Indeed, last year it didn't happen at all. So little wonder that Welsh Conservatives were pleased to spend Saturday at the Liberty Stadium in Swansea for a one-day conference.

For Mr Jones, it was his first chance to speak to the Welsh conference since his promotion to secretary of state last September.

"Our Welsh Conference is always very special," he said. "It is the occasion when the Welsh Conservatives family comes together to celebrate our achievements and to look forward to the future."

You can read a report of his speech here.

Swansea also offered another debut - last year's cancellation meant this was the first full Welsh conference Andrew RT Davies had spoken to since assuming leadership of the Tory group in the National Assembly for Wales. (He did speak to a rally in St Asaph that filled the gap before last year's local elections).

You can check out his speech here. Mr Davies announced his party had arrived at a "clause four moment" (echoing Tony Blair's modernisation of Labour), warning that some were still fighting the devolution battles of the 1990s.

He didn't name names and given that it is eight years since the Tories went into an election offering the option of scrapping the assembly he may have been almost the last Conservative to declare the war against devolution is over.

Mr Davies did offer an insight into his leadership style, via an interview with PA News. "When people look at me," he said, "they would say I'm not a typical Conservative. And when you talk about the working man, I think people can relate to yours truly as a guy who could easily prop up the bar in the local pub or rub shoulders with statesmen around the world."

Few mainstream political leaders would describe themselves in a way that makes them sound like Nigel Farage in wellies but in an age when voters complain all politicians are the same Mr Davies is trying hard to offer something different.

There weren't too many statesmen to rub shoulders with in Swansea, apparently (I was working in Cardiff), but the prime minister did drop in.

As you might expect, David Cameron used his conference speech to criticise Labour's record running the Welsh government.

Besides the usual rhetoric on health and education, he said Welsh ministers "pulled Wales' premier soap opera - Pobol Y Cwm - from the airwaves, because one of the characters on it criticised their policies."

That may be a slight exaggeration of what happened, but you don't go to party conferences expecting 100 per cent accuracy.

Mr Cameron added: "It's like Wilson used to say in Dad's Army: "they don't like it up 'em"."

Hmmm. Wilson? The prime minister appears to have confused Sergeant Wilson, the calmly well-spoken deputy to Captain Mainwaring with Corporal Jones, the excitable butcher and World War One veteran.

As Sergeant Wilson might say: "Are you sure that's wise, prime minister?" Mainwaring might have come up with a variation of the phrase he usually reserved for Private Pike.