The Duke of Wellington, Stephen Crabb and Donald Trump

Taking your calls: Scottish-born Welsh Secretary Stephen Crabb

If a man be born in a stable, said the Duke of Wellington, it does not make him a horse.

That is not an argument that would convince Gail from Neath, one of the callers to the Jason Mohammad show on BBC Radio Wales on Monday.

Gail took Welsh Secretary Stephen Crabb to task for not being born in what she called the heart of Wales - the Valleys and North Wales. She told him forcefully he was therefore unable to understand the impact of the Tata steel job losses in Port Talbot.

"I was born in Scotland and grew up in Wales," pleaded the Preseli Pembrokeshire MP. "That doesn't make you Welsh," insisted Gail. "I know you are the Welsh secretary but you are not Welsh."

Mr Crabb is not the first Welsh politician to have been born elsewhere. David Lloyd George was born in Manchester; Lord Wigley in Derby, [Stephen Crabb's shadow] Nia Griffith in Dublin and Kirsty Williams in Somerset.

Other politicians can boast strong affiliations to the areas they serve without having been born there: the Mayor of London and future Tory leadership contender Boris Johnson was born in New York.

But I digress. Most of the 'phone-in focused rightly on the steel jobs announcement, which is being comprehensively covered elsewhere. Mr Crabb told callers that the Port Talbot plant was losing £1m a day.

'Donald Trump'

Jason tried valiantly to discover how the secretary of state will vote in the forthcoming referendum on Britain's membership of the EU. Mr Crabb is a fan of the single market and said he would not want to lose that if Britain left, although he said he wasn't one of those who lost sleep worrying about Britain's future outside the EU.

So how will he vote? "If we get the renegotiation that we are talking about, and it does hinge on that, four really key areas where we are talking to Europe about changing they way Britain is part of the European Union, if we land that, then I think that the pragmatic decision will be to stay in.

"But let's have that conversation when we are nearer the time and we know what the renegotiation package is."

That "renegotiation package" may become known within a month or so, so we may not have long to find out. Perhaps the key word in his comments today is "pragmatic".

Mr Crabb was also asked about the debate over whether or not Donald Trump should be banned from the UK. His reply was rather less ambiguous than his comments about the EU: "I think it's a ridiculous debate to have in parliament on a day when we're talking about the future of the steel industry in Wales. We're talking about the stupid views of a stupid man in another country, 3,000 miles away."