“Do not trust the horse, Trojans! Whatever it is. I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts.” Those famous words of Virgil sprang to mind (oh yes they did!) in the wake of a recent visit by Big Dave Cameron to Wales.

All the attempts at Prime Minister’s question time to cover the coalition government’s continuing destruction of NHS England by a campaign of hate against NHS Wales were not likely to smooth his path west.

His latest vitriolic sally of abuse during PMQs was a warning to his English electorate not to cross Offa’s “wall of death” Dyke into the perils of a failed healthcare system.

No doubt he was cushioned on his visit by his luxurious Celtic Manor digs.

The gift I was thinking of in my Virgil moment was an agreement announced at an Investment in Wales gig of a deal on the financing of the electrification of the South Wales Valleys rail lines into Cardiff (cost £230 million) ending a 12-month dispute as to who would would pay for what and how.

The project was revealed last December when it was agreed that Westminster would pay the whole lot.

Cameron appearing on Welsh television at the time said quite clearly that Westminster would pay. Faced the other day with this clip Cameron said something like “Ah well.”

Throughout Wales, First Minister Carwyn Jones and his ministers have maintained in public appearances the deal was half each, and in effect this is what is to happen.

Westminster will pay £125 million upfront. The Welsh government will pay its part from revenues when the lines are working and will decide who gets the franchise from 2018.

There is a golden opportunity here for the Labour movement to make the case for nationalisation.

As reported in the Morning Star at the weekend, Wales’s Transport Minister Edwina Hart has announced the creation of a not-for-profit company that could run lines currently operated by privateer Arriva.

The Welsh Tories have already jumped in calling Hart a “Marxist” for signalling that the franchise will be brought back into public ownership. And she’s a Morning Star reader to boot.

Sceptics are apt to say that this about-turn has something to do with there being a general election on the horizon. Let’s not be so cynical.

Major projects like HS2 and Crossrail — which both favour the south-east of England — and the Welsh rail modernisation are being trumpeted as the biggest rail building programme since Victorian times and, with a £15 billion road programme, the biggest expansion of transport routes since the Romans.

Wales will get its share relative to its population but grandiose road programmes have come and gone.

You can see the queues forming now to object to the decimation of the environment.

Once announced such grand projects tend to have a gestation period that puts elephants to shame and jam tomorrow turns out to be spread very thinly if at all.

My question is how is it that the money, theoretically, can be found for these massive projects, while the myriad of potholes deepen for lack of funds?

There were once thousands of British construction workers employed on these large projects at home and abroad but since the destruction of our skilled workers base, started by Thatcher with the abolition of the training boards, we don’t have the skills in Britain to do this work.

If anything near the work needed by these projects come to fruition the influx of foreign labour is likely to be immense.

The bribes business seems to be picking up even as I write but we’ll end with the £2-billion-a-year promise to try and fix the NHS in England before it is fully privatised, which will mean about £70 million to Wales depending how the books are cooked.

In Wales, money for the NHS is not ringfenced and will go into the kitty so that it can be used to finance other services, such as social care, which can directly help the NHS, with care in the community helping to unblock hospital beds.

This infuriates the Tories in Wales who seek to follow the English leadership in everything they say and do.

So that’s good.

So the race is on for our hearts and minds, set with a very low opinion of ordinary people’s price for their loyalties and clouded by as much smoke and mirrors as Cameron and Osborne can muster.

I started with Virgil but let’s end with Abraham Lincoln: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”