Matt Smith has stood as a Conservative and Unionist candidate for Parliament and the Senedd. He was a Policy Analyst at Vote Leave.
Baroness Morgan of Ely has been crowned as Welsh Labour’s third first minister and party leader this year following the resignation of Vaughan Gething, her hapless predecessor.
Back in March, Mark Drakeford stepped down after his plummeting approval ratings and controversial 20 mph speed limit policy showed him to be an electoral liability. To paraphrase Sir Humphrey Appleby, to lose one first minister may be considered a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness.
Following her appointment Morgan told the Senedd that “the grey suits are out” and to women watching, “your potential is limitless” though her government will include the same number of Senedd members in lounge suites. This did not stop Lord Hain, a former Welsh Secretary, from unctuously declaring Morgan to be a ‘star talent’, which is just as well. She takes office after four months of internecine strife.
Gething’s abortive leadership ended in tears when his 118-day regime succumbed to a palace coup which landed Keir Starmer with his first major internal party headache. Three Cabinet members and his senior legal advisor resigned in unison following his defeat in a non-binding confidence vote and after Welsh Labour’s allies Plaid Cymru ended the Co-operation Agreement.
His brief tenure was overshadowed by a £200,000 leadership campaign donation from a twice-convicted businessman. The botched dismissal of a Cabinet minister added to the appearance of chaos. Gething claimed he was never accepted as First Minister by opponents in his party and “those in Wales who look like me” feel “personally bruised and worried.”
In what few would describe as a ‘ministry of all the talents’ Mark Drakeford will reprise his earlier role as Health Secretary on an interim basis. Morgan says this will “improve transparency and delivery” despite Drakeford having rejected calls as First Minister for a Wales Covid Inquiry claiming loftily that “the world has moved on.”
It would be churlish to deny that Morgan and Gething – respectively the first female and the first black Welsh First Ministers – are signs of upward social mobility in modern Britain.
Yet in another sense, both politicians are archetypes of a rising class of networked left-wing careerists who have dominated Welsh devolution. Both are consummate Labour insiders. Morgan’s ‘political’ family home “was the headquarters for political activity in the West of Cardiff.”
Stints as a stagiaire at the Socialist Group of the European Parliament, S4C, and BBC Wales led to a seat in the European Parliament at the age of 27. A peerage followed in 2010. Then in 2016, she entered the Welsh Assembly on the Labour Party-controlled regional list for Mid and West Wales.
Gething joined the Labour Party at the age of 17, was a President of NUS Wales, worked as a researcher for Welsh Labour Assembly members, and joined a trades union-affiliated law firm. He was President of the Wales Trade Union Congress before joining the Assembly.
Yet the recent history of devolved governments shows that ‘being first’ is not enough when voters judge performance by demonstrable competence and delivery.
Welsh Labour’s problem is precisely that Morgan is typical of the systemic politicians who have ruled Wales for over twenty-five years. Beyond the hagiographies and the adulation of the Cardiff Bay elites, she is no less steeped in her party’s woeful track record of failure.
The Welsh government’s endemic failure to secure output legitimacy is a major political headache.
During her previous 2018 leadership bid Morgan said “We must put our hands up and admit” we have “failed to make the impact that we could and should have in the economy”. Six years on, Wales’ economic inactivity rate is the highest in Britain.
Morgan’s management of the Welsh NHS saw waiting lists for hospital treatments reach a record high with nearly one in five waiting to be seen. Thousands more patients now seek NHS treatment in England.
The OECD ranks Welsh schoolchildren behind the rest of the UK for reading and mathematics. Of the home nations, Wales has the lowest percentage of 18-year-olds applying to university.
Unable to attract legitimacy through delivery, successive Welsh Labour leaders have instead sought horizontal legitimacy by appealing to Cardiff Bay’s elites.
Nanny statism, cringe identity politics, and virtue-signalling are pitches for the continued support of the pressure groups, lobbyists, activist civil society groups, and trade unions that make up the shadow party that runs Welsh Labour, which in turn rules Wales.
Now that Labour is in power at both ends of the M4 motorway, Morgan will not have the benefit of playing oppositional politics against London or the ‘devolution in danger’ card.
It will be harder to rely on poorly understood devolutionary boundaries to avoid responsibility. Indeed Morgan was recently criticised for posing with a ‘Labour will modernise our NHS’ placard despite being responsible for the Welsh NHS despite being the Welsh Government health minister.
There will be less ‘clear red water’ between Downing Street and Cardiff Bay. And without the Hobbesian bark of a Drakeford-style lockdown, it will be harder to manufacture regulatory borders in a sop to nationalist sentiment.
Renewal in office is very difficult for a party that by the 2026 Senedd elections will have been in power nearly three decades. Morgan’s deputy Huw Irranca-Davies worries that the public has already ‘switched off’ from a party obsessed “with its own issues”. Welsh Labour’s Cardiff Central MS Jenny Rathbone has already said there is a “vacuum” around Morgan.
Across Wales Labour’s vote share fell against their national swing while turnout was lower than the rest of the UK, falling more than ten points on 2019, a development that former Labour leader Neil Kinnock said is already a “cause for real concern”.
This may portend further electoral decline on the road to the 2026 Senedd elections now slated to take place entirely under a proportional representation system that will encourages the fragmentation of large established electoral coalitions.
Morgan’s government will now embark on a summer-long apology tour come “listening exercise”, in the hope of leaving this year’s omnishambles behind, followed by a further reshuffle in the autumn.
In her acceptance speech, Morgan described both herself and Gething as “links in a ‘chain of leadership’ that stretches back twenty-five years”. If this is how the Baroness comes to be framed in voters’ minds then she may already have written her own political epitaph.
