Book extract: Into The Abyss – Brexit fallout

In the third extract from his memoir Into The Abyss, former Carmarthen East & Dinefwr MP Jonathan Edwards writes about how Leanne Wood’s leadership of Plaid Cymru fell apart as the party grappled with Brexit

Leanne’s leadership gradually fell apart. Her biggest problem was that she had two members of her group who wanted to do the top job, Adam and Rhun ap Iorwerth.

When the media sniff a story, they run with it relentlessly. The other parties were also fuelling speculation to destabilise the party.

When neither Adam nor Rhun would dampen speculation then obviously the whole thing escalated.

I don’t envy anyone who takes a leadership role within a political party. It must be a very lonely place.

Leanne had strengthened her grip on the voluntary party, but she had no key lieutenant in the National Assembly group to protect herself.

Intense scrutiny

The stakes of Brexit also meant that the positioning of political leaders was under intense scrutiny. Everyone was working under massive pressure, and in those circumstances emotions were heightened.

For my part, I had a huge amount of respect for Leanne as a politician. I just thought with the emergence of Corbyn and Brexit it was a bad time for her to be leading the party.

She very much viewed politics through the left v right prism as do the Plaid Left. I saw politics primarily through a nationalist v unionist paradigm despite coming from the left politically.

Brexit amplified these tensions. For the Left, they had always looked at the single market dubiously as it was a Thatcherite creation.

I could not see how you could advance the Welsh national cause ultimately unless Wales and England were part of a larger economic entity.

A Welsh independence referendum could never be won if it entailed border posts on Offa’s Dyke and dislocation of economic activity.

My criticism of the leadership was twofold. Firstly, the emergence of Corbyn had changed the political landscape. It was bananas to try and outflank Labour from the left.

Leanne showed no indication that she was going to change her approach after the 2017 election when her approach had failed for a second time.

In the party’s Spring Conference in March 2018, I offered a bit of what I thought was friendly advice which I had already made public after the 2016 election in the Western Mail when I said the party couldn’t defeat the Labour Party by arguing about the intricacies of socialist theory.

The media latched onto my speech. I had actually paid tribute to her earlier in my remarks.

All the party leadership needed to do was laugh it off and the story would have died. Instead they completely overreacted, and the story blew up. That is the problem with pure ideologues: they can’t accept criticism even if it is not intended as a challenge. In the Labour Party or Tories it would have been taken at face value and just portrayed as a difference of opinion.

The number of messages of support I received from party members was quite considerable, including from the current MP for Caerfyrddin.

I was asked to do media interviews, and I downplayed the whole affair. If my intention was to initiate a change of leadership, I would have said so.

I probably became public enemy number one for the Plaid Cymru Left from that moment on.

I was informed that Adam was not best pleased. He had accused me, to one of my staff members, of not being a team player. To be fair to him he probably had a point.

I never went through official Plaid channels before making comments to the media. Journalists would phone me up knowing I would give them a usable quote. I hated being bogged down in process and if everything had to be run through the party or press officers, I would never say anything of any worth.

Looking back there was considerable resentment amongst some colleagues at the profile I had generated over the years and my ability to generate headlines.

As the Brexit debates raged on, I think it is fair to say the Westminster group considered the leadership of the party as AWOL.

I can’t recall one conversation with Leanne on Brexit policy. I was working with several different groups in Parliament by this stage and was gaming what would happen if the Prime Minister were to fall. One of the options was the formation of an alternative short-term government of national unity, with the support of members from across the House, with the aim of negotiating a soft Brexit and then putting that option to the people in a referendum.

This provided a viable means of achieving the party’s position of avoiding a hard Brexit. Again, I had made these comments on the floor of the House so they shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone and the Welsh media.

Anna Soubry was interviewed making similar comments and the UK media latched onto the story. I was asked by the Western Mail for a response as they had previously reported on my views, and I said we would be prepared to play our part.

To be perfectly frank, by this stage in proceedings I would have faced all consequences if it came to it. I wasn’t interested in playing optical games in Parliament, I wanted to play my part in achieving a better Brexit outcome. If it meant the end of my career, so be it.

I received a call from Ben O’Keefe, who at this stage was on secondment as Chief of Staff for the National Assembly group, saying the leader was in a state of complete rage about the story because it meant that we would have to work with some Tories, even though they were on the same side as us on the biggest question in British politics for a generation.

At this stage I lost all faith in Leanne as leader. I can’t recall exactly what I replied, but it was probably very short and to the point along the lines of what exactly is her suggestion of how to resolve this mess.

We never received a reply from the leader of the party.

Elected Members and the NEC were summoned to the National Library in May 2018 for a strategy discussion. A lot of work had been done on targets for constituencies going forward. I interjected by saying that targets weren’t a strategy for the Brexit crisis engulfing politics and that if we achieved one thing in the meeting, we needed to make a decision once and for all on one key question.

Was our strategy to work with Labour in Wales to create a buffer against the Tory UK Government?

This was Leanne’s preferred strategy as I saw it as she was opposed to working with the Conservatives. Or were we in the business of trying to remove Labour?

From where I came from, in the context of Brexit, shadowing Labour had major issues as they were on the wrong side of the Brexit question.

It also made life easy for Labour as they then only had to polarise against the Tories to make us irrelevant.

If we were in the business of creating an alternative government for Wales, we had to accept the consequences of what that meant.

Adam then turned up late to the meeting and asked to do his own presentation where he made the case for an understanding with the Tories in the Assembly with a detailed power point presentation.

It must have appeared to Leanne as a pre-planned pincer movement, I can categorically rule that out. Adam and I never spoke regularly enough to engage in detailed plotting.

Leanne, aware of the manoeuvrings of Adam and Rhun, started panicking. She called on the party to give her until the next Assembly election when she would then stand down.

It was a completely defeatist statement which indicated she was losing grip of the party.

Rumours emerged then that she had set up her own organised faction within the party called ‘Coch’. Effectively it was a party within a party.

Liz ingeniously labelled it ‘Cochmentum’ after the pro-Corbyn Momentum faction within the Labour Party.

She completely lost the elected wing of the party then, as we had a leader who was more interested in internal party division to shore up her position than taking the fight to our opponents, and also a leader who was prepared to move against non-believers in the professional wing of the party.

I was out knocking on doors in my home village of Capel Hendre for the Saron ward by-election following the death of Cllr Alun Davies when Martin Shipton phoned.

He had got wind of the leadership’s displeasure at the position of the Westminster group about the formation of an alternative all-party government.

I wasn’t going to lie when asked a straight question, especially on a long-held position.

I just said it as it was: the leader had no interest in Brexit and preferred her pet niche subjects.

Leanne and her supporters on the Left of the party really took this to heart.

I wasn’t trying to undermine the importance of these issues that the Left of the party saw as foundational for their politics. I was merely commentating that as Brexit was coming to a head the focus should be on that.

Leanne replied by accusing me of pursuing a scorched earth policy which I thought was an overreaction.

By this stage, Leanne had resorted to calling any male politician who had a difference of opinion with her a misogynist. It was pathetic.

When Adam’s leadership was engulfed in crisis following the Nerys Evans ’Project Pawb’ report, one of Leanne’s key lieutenants, Carrie Harper from Wrexham, wrote an article for Nation Cymru entitled ‘Misogyny not so niche now’.

Adam called for a joint leadership model and the National Assembly Group were in revolt calling for a leadership election. Leanne said she was confident that she had the support of the membership and therefore welcomed the challenge from Adam and Rhun.

Her advisers probably should have told her to look beyond the number of likes on Twitter. She was to end up last in the contest.

Carl [Harris] was leading the election campaign for Adam which gave him a huge advantage. Carl had developed into a political tour de force; he was streets ahead of anything else the party had to offer in terms of campaigning.

The only other comparable figure in the party was Geraint Day and he was a party employee and was therefore unable to take part in any capacity.

There was a huge data-gathering exercise which enabled clever targeting at the end of the campaign. It was a sophisticated operation.

I felt duty-bound to support Adam even though our relationship wasn’t the easiest on occasion. Out of the three candidates he was streets ahead when it came to political vision.

Rhun is a great communicator but is a policy-free zone. I was an admirer of his as I knew his nationalism was genuine. I thought he could well make a good leader if he surrounded himself with a team of individuals who could make up for some of his deficiencies.

We launched Adam’s campaign in Carmarthen in early August to a full hall. I hated internal elections but made a speech which focussed on the seriousness of the political situation facing Wales and that we needed the best person in charge to chart the party and the country through the months and years ahead.

The data coming back indicated that it was a contest between Adam and Rhun. Adam then decided to launch an attack on nuclear policy aimed at placing Rhun in difficulty.

He argued that Wales could never afford to be an independent country if it had a nuclear power station on its territory. Rhun supported a second Wylfa plant on Ynys Môn. Adam had always been firmly anti-nuclear, and it was an old battle position of the Left within Plaid to undermine Ieuan Wyn Jones when he was leader.

I really didn’t like the tactic to redeploy it against Rhun, I detested friendly fire loaded with spite.

Meanwhile, Leanne’s supporters were vile on social media. If anyone was pursuing a scorched earth policy, it was her team.

Adam was to win convincingly at the end of September 2018, with nearly 50% of the vote in the first round. Leanne only polled 22.3%. I understand that she must have felt completely humiliated. She had initiated the election to shut down her opponents convinced the members would back her.

She became very bitter at an enormous cost to the cause of our country. She has deployed the Cochmentum organisation she developed to settle scores with her opponents within the party.

I was to be ultimately a victim of her purge. It must be very sad to live a life of existence based on revenge.

Adam probably realised he had to get his old comrades on the Left of the party back on side. In his first Conference speech the next week in Cardigan I felt as if he deliberately threw me under a bus with Leanne’s supporters. The words of Lenin come to mind, I had been a ‘useful idiot’ for him in his leadership ambitions.

Into The Abyss by Jonathan Edwards is published by Cambria Books at £18.