Welsh Secretary David Jones gives up Twitter for Lent

London: The Welsh Secretary, David Jones, has given up Twitter for Lent. It has left the 60-year old’s followers without regular updates on Welsh rugby, Liverpool FC and the minutiae of his train journey between Westminster and the constituency home he shares with his wife Sara, a former nurse, on the north Wales coast.

He now might have wished he’d have done the same about discussing gay marriage. In the run up to the Commons vote he declined to be drawn into the debate on the matter saying “this bears no relation to his role as secretary of state for Wales”. However, he was always identified as one of the Conservative party’s most prominent rebels on the matter, telling one constituent last March: “I believe that marriage is an institution ordained to sanctify a union between a man and a woman.”

Originally a solicitor, trained in London, but working in Wales, the Welsh-speaking MP for Clwyd West was appointed to the cabinet in the September 2012 reshuffle after spells in the Welsh assembly, as a backbench MP and then shadow and junior minister.

The father of two has previously declared a membership of the freemasons, although he said in 2009 that he had not been active for many years.

Earlier this month, he was mocked in the press as “Jones the Jag” because he was seen to get into his ministerial car outside the Welsh Office, in Whitehall, only to be driven no more than 100 metre to Downing Street.