THE SENEDD plenary session of 30 April turned its back on crazy stuff and entered the world of the red squirrel. Very sensible. Who’d want to be stuck in a claustrophobic and windowless chamber with their individual purveyors of electromagnetic radiation and feeling as pallid as everyone else looks?

Attention locked on to not only those delicate denizens of Ynys Môn but focused too on the Senedd's interest in the equally celebrated water-voles of the Gwent Levels.

‘No-mow May’ (just stop flattening our roadside wild plants, if only for a month) got a mention, as did biodiversity-depletion (if you want to carry on eating, start looking after pollinators) and nature-networks.

For a while, all was peace and harmony, man. Then mainstream barged back in.

Andrew R T Davies, who had sat mute during the nature ramble, rose to lead the charge against the newish first minister, ex-Aberystwyth University student Vaughan Gething, who wore one of his trade-mark bright blue suits and regarded the leader of the opposition with a look of patient forbearance, punctuated by microseconds of alarm and slightly longer-lasting quizzical amusement.

Davies, built like a tree-trunk, is lucid and tends to deploy a carefully modulated barbed courtesy - augmented by an impressive repertoire of hand-gestures - in his ritualised brushes with first ministers.

There was of course only one thing he wanted to talk about. Gething accepted a £200,000 personal donation to support his Labour leadership campaign from recycling firm Dauson Environmental Group, whose director, David John Neal, was in 2013 given a three-month suspended sentence for illegally dumping waste and, in 2017, a suspended sentence of 18 weeks for not clearing it up.

The first minister is facing growing calls to pay the money back and to order an independent inquiry into the donations, which helped him secure a narrow victory in the race to replace Mark Drakeford.

Instead, he has ordered an internal review led by former first minster Carwyn Jones, while repeatedly emphasising that he has not broken any rules. But, unsurprisingly, we could now be edging towards real doubt about whether Gething can survive in the top job. If a senior politician could fail through a combination of lousy judgment and foolhardiness, this could well be that moment.

Davies fairly rasped: “We have obviously seen continued speculation and comment on the substantial donation you received for your leadership campaign. That company…in their accounts stated: ‘…the external opportunities for the Dauson group to succeed continue to be mainly legislatively driven.’ You are leader and first minister of the government that sets the legislative agenda.

“Can you not see why people are deeply concerned about the tensions between the substantial donation, the comments…in the accounts about the legislative opportunities and your accepting of that donation?”

Gething replied, not for the first time, that all donations had been declared and all rules followed. Then: “I could not, have not and will not make any kind of ministerial choice around that company.”

He could hardly have been clearer. But unease, if only about faulty judgment, persists, and could become unstoppable.