Diolch, Llywydd. I rise this afternoon to remember Carl, as a politician, as a colleague, and as a friend. I want first to express my deep sympathies to Bernie and the family. For them, it's been a time of unbearable loss and deep trauma. As a father and husband myself, I can't begin to imagine what they're going through. I hope they've found some comfort in each other and in the many messages of support from around Wales.

Carl was somebody whose presence in this Chamber was obvious to all. He took more legislation through here than any other Minister. And he had a knack of turning difficult pieces of legislation into something worth while. There's no better example of that than the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015—an idea that began as little more than one line in a manifesto and nothing else. When I told him he was going to take it forward, his response was, 'Thanks for that', but he turned it into something that is now being talked about around the world. 

I first met Carl in Connah's Quay Labour Club in 2001. I'd gone to speak to the local Labour party when Tom Middlehurst was the Assembly Member. When he was elected here in 2003, we became friends. His particular talents came to the fore when he was chief whip, when I saw with my own eyes that he was capable of gentle berating where necessary, to, on one occasion taking a reluctant AM out to feed the ducks to persuade them to vote the right way. A man of many talents. In all the years I knew him, we never had a cross word. We spent a lot of time talking together about the challenges of being a dad and the pressures of politics, sometimes gossiping about Cabinet colleagues. And he was always full of advice. Only last year he told me that he was the only one allowed a grey beard in Cabinet, so I had to shave mine off, First Minister or not. I had no choice but to listen.

He was ever-present in the Cabinet, and with good reason. I appointed him because he was good at legislation, he was good with people, and because he brought the voice of Deeside to the heart of Government.

In 2003, he was a key part of my leadership campaign. His role was to organise things in the north, but things didn't always go smoothly. He organised a curry evening with party members, in a curry house in his constituency. And as I was being driven there, he phoned in a panic,'Don't come', he said, 'the restaurant is being raided by the border agency', or words to that effect. We'd often meet up in Lesley Griffiths's room in the Assembly, late at night during that leadership campaign, when he would always be the last to arrive, and he'd make a great show of pretending to look around him to make sure he hadn't been followed. He did that every time we had those meetings.

His voice was usually welcome, but not always. We went to London together to a parliamentary Labour Party Christmas party some years ago, and we shared a room in a hotel in Paddington. I have to admit that I left early, but Carl soldiered on, and I was woken at three in the morning to hear Carl's voice on my phone saying, 'What's the name of the hotel we're staying in?' Having woken me up, he then arrived and went to sleep, only for us to be woken up by the fire alarm at seven o'clock in the morning. We at least had nothing to do with that.

Carl was a great one for karaoke. The Labour group bash at Christmas always had him as the DJ and the karaoke king, and he was good at it, putting many of us to shame at his fortieth birthday party. He loved to remind us, when he said, 'You south Walians can't sing', and in my case that was utterly true. It is difficult to imagine what it'll be like this year without him, and in subsequent years.

He was also, as Members will remember, the best heckler in the Chamber—never nasty, always witty. The Conservative benches will know that, whenever the leader of the opposition rose to speak, he would invariably call out someone else's name. And so, Paul Davies, Darren Millar, Angela Burns have all been called in turn to speak as leader of the opposition.

Yes, that was the man that we called 'Sarge'. Well-liked and committed, jovial but determined, firm but fun, and he will be missed by his family, by those in this Chamber, and by the nation.