TODAY, the Queen officially opens Wales' new Assembly building on St David's Day. MIKE BUCKINGHAM takes a critical look at the £67 million creation which awaits her.

I was searching for the one word with which to describe the new Assembly building when one seemed to take control of my pen.

I looked down at my notebook and saw that almost without realising it I had written the word 'furtive'.

The Assembly building looks out across a wide sweep of Cardiff Bay and yet instead of dominating the scene shoots sly glances at its neighbours as if unsure that it should be there at all.

So humdrum is this building that were it not for the absence of an advertising sign one might take it a slightly up-market branch of Harry Ramsdens.

We instinctively feel that buildings housing legislative chambers should make a statement about themselves. The Assembly hangs back and watches you from the shadows of finer structures. There is something vaguely sneaky about it.

The first thing that must surely strike Her Majesty the Queen today is that despite the flypast by RAF jets and protestations of loyalty there is nothing in the building she is here to open that marks her authority as Queen.

Nowhere is there a Royal coat-of-arms as surely there should be in a building in which laws are enacted in her name.

I asked the public relations person who had been delegated to show me around about this and she replied, "I think they wanted to keep it sort of neutral". Perhaps.

But one thing the new Assembly will not be neutral towards is the European Union. The European stars fly outside the Assembly building claiming the same status as the flag of Wales and the Union Flag. The committee-rooms and debates are saturated with talk of European directives (directives, mark you. Not advice or requests, but directives).

Nobody with any feel for the mechanics of power can be left in any doubt about what the Assembly actually is. Beneath the veneer of Welsh names - Siambr and Cwrt and Senedd and all the rest - lies the reality that the people to be governed stand in no different relationship to Europe as the conquered Celts stood in relation to Rome.

Although mundane from the outside, blighted since birth by wrangles about who was to design it, undesired by a majority of Welsh people and with a huge budget overrun leading to a final cost of £67 million, it would nevertheless be churlish to deny the Assembly its good points.

As a place for members to work it is better by far than its London or Washington counterparts and members of the public have easy access to it,which is refreshing in our tremulous times. Wisely, the designers realised that only a part of a member's time in the chamber is spent actually listening to or taking part in debates.

As flights of rhetoric take other members over the arid plains of inclusivity in arts funding or plans to standardise European daylight time, those without a shred of interest in such subjects can use their fully electronically-equipped seats-cum-workpoints to answer e-mails or simply surf the internet. (A word of advice for AMs tempted to explore some of the more exotic internet sites - people in the public gallery can see over your shoulder).

Having a circular debating chamber is a good thing. It is less intimidating and helps the acoustics. The official line for the main chamber being in the round is that it encourages a non-adversarial debating style. The real reason, one strongly suspects, is that television cameras can move easily on a circular rail running just below the public viewing area.

Give an enthusiast for the new Assembly the chance and they will use the buzzword 'transparency' several times, thus making a connection between the openness of the building and what goes on inside it where logically, no such link need exist.

Externally, there is indeed a lot of glass giving the building a horticultural aspect accentuated by the wind cowl directly above the debating chamber which looks for all the world like something taken from a Kentish oast-house. In summer the cowl catches cooling breezes and directs them downwards. In winter, as my guide informed me without any trace of irony, "All the hot air goes up through the roof".

The point about transparency is that for it to have any meaning people must have a desire to look into whatever it is that's supposed to be happening.

In fact the Assembly has not captured the imagination of Wales. Even if it were the grandest building in the world with more marble than the Taj Mahal people would still remember that its creation was heavily gerrymandered by the UK government with the added suspicion of electoral shenanigans.

Yesterday, while waiting for the Assembly to begin its leisurely working day, I took a walk around the Bay. Moored behind the new Assembly, where the week before had been tethered a humble minesweeper, was a huge vessel of the Royal Navy, bristling with missiles and helicopters. The ship's name was HMS Westminster.

A not-so-subtle reminder, perhaps, that despite today's ballyhoo the big guns, when it comes to the ruling of Wales, are 140 miles down the M4 and that, for as far into the future as can be foreseen, is where they are going to stay.