The Labour leadership campaign has been running for so long that it has a BC date stamp - Before Christmas.
It began on 14 December, the day after Mark Drakeford announced he was standing down.
And it might have dragged on still further given how close the candidates are in terms of policy and their position in the party.
Thanks though to campaign donations, it hasn’t.
But one of these in particular has attracted headlines, namely the £200,000 given to Vaughan Gething’s campaign by a company whose owner has twice been convicted for the illegal dumping of waste.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It is a huge amount of money for Welsh politics and, for context, Mr Drakeford said this week that he spent £25,000 in his leadership campaign back in 2018.
But behind the scenes there is disquiet, or “real anger and fury” as one puts it and “an increasing and enormous frustration” around the donations and an earlier row over a union nomination.
Another harks back to a previous Welsh Labour rift in 1999 between supporters of Alun Michael and Rhodri Morgan “that took a long time to heal”.
Mr Gething’s supporters have stood by their man, one insisting that everything is well within the rules whilst also saying that if victorious he will need to unite the group and the party around the government.
The Welsh Conservatives are already waiting eagerly to go on the attack if Mr Gething wins - albeit their colleagues at Westminster have their own donation issues.
That agreement runs until the end of the year, so if Mr Gething wins and the money is not given back does that bring to a head the signs of rupture that have been starting to emerge?
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