How Eluned Morgan’s experience in Europe could help her pick up the pieces from the Gething scandals

Luke James, Brussels

Beyond the fact that she was once the youngest member of the European Parliament, little seems to be remembered about Eluned Morgan’s time in Brussels and Strasbourg.

MEPs always struggled to inspire the same interest in their work as that enjoyed by politicians in the national arena and, post-Brexit, perhaps the role is seen as less relevant.

However, the fifteen years Morgan spent as an MEP – double her experience in the Senedd – remain important to understanding the future First Minister as both a politician and a person.

“Eluned is one hundred percent Welsh and one hundred percent international, sometimes you get one of the other” said Gareth Harding, a Welsh writer in Brussels who first got to know Morgan when they were students at Atlantic College, the specialist international sixth form based in the Vale of Glamorgan.

“She either arrived at Atlantic College speaking Spanish or very, very quickly did and made excellent friends with her Colombian roommate and people from all over the world.

“The combination of being interested in politics and being international led her very quickly to Brussels.”

European studies

After earning a degree in European studies from the University of Hull and working as a researcher in TV as well as in the European Parliament, she was elected in a Labour landslide at the 1994 European elections held just a month after the death of the then party leader John Smith.

“Everything I have done has been geared towards this,” she told the Wales on Sunday. “It all sounds very calculated and in a sense it was. But I didn’t expect to get it all at such an early age.”

Morgan was 27 when she arrived in Brussels to represent Mid and West Wales. “She was incredibly young, looked incredibly young, still liked to party,” remembered Harding, who was by then also working for the Labour group in Brussels. “She was 27 after all, why not.”

As well as an outgoing character, the ability of the former Ysgol Gyfun Gymraeg Glantaf student to speak multiple languages helped her make a positive first impression in Brussels.

“She had good linguistic abilities unlike some of the Brits”, said Richard Corbett, a former leader of Labour’s European group. “She could speak good French and Spanish. That meant she networked very well because she could speak to people in their own language, not just relying on English as a lingua franca.

“I think most people got on with her. I certainly did. She was lively, she would be doing the work but also joining in the social events and gatherings.”

Her age meant she was, rather predictably, initially put on the Parliament committee for culture, youth, education and the media. But she went out of her way not to be pigeon holed.

“I seem to remember that she realised agriculture and farming was a big thing at European level and I think she took herself off to work on a farm one summer to get firsthand knowledge, experience and connection,” said Corbett. “Everyone, from what I remember, was quite impressed by that.”

Stand out

That helped her stand out among a group of 62 Labour MPs and earn a place on Parliament’s powerful budget control committee.

“Labour at that point were the biggest group that there ever had been and ever has been in the European Parliament,” said Harding.

“Even then, she stood out and not just because she was young. She was hardworking. She was on the budget committee, which was a tough and important committee.

“It’s one of those ones where unlike, say, the foreign affairs committee, you’re not just making student statements, you’re holding to account the EU budget of currently 170 Billion and doing hard forensic work.”

Morgan’s work on that committee means she has some experience when it comes to dealing with a high profile resignation caused by a scandal.

She was still in her first term as a member of the European Parliament in March 1999 when, for the first and so far only time, the European Commission – including then Transport Commissioner Neil Kinnock – resigned en masse amid allegations of financial mismanagement and fraud.

Morgan played a part in the dramatic events as a member of the committee which scrutinised allegations centred on French Commissioner Edith Cresson, who was accused of awarding lucrative foreign aid contracts to her local dentist.

And, after being returned to represent the new Wales-wide constituency at the European elections of 1999, she was made the Socialist group coordinator on the budget control committee, which was now charged with holding the Commission to their promises of reform.

“She and I both realised that as long as reporting about Europe was dominated by fraud, corruption, waste and inefficiency, that was a huge stumbling block to getting people to support the process of European integration overall,” said Michiel van Hulten, then an MEP for the Dutch Labour party and former director of Transparency International EU.

“It gave Brussels a bad name, it gave the EU a bad name. So, addressing those issues was necessary in order to be able to make progress in policy areas like the environment, social policy or employment that were so important to us, and still are, as socialists.”

Named and shamed

Morgan used her position to campaign against the “scandalous” waste of taxpayers’ money involved in moving meetings between Brussels and Strasbourg, tried to tighten rules on benefits for EU officials and MEPs, and called for people who misused EU funds to be named and shamed.

Although she later herself received similar treatment from the Wales on Sunday, which reported that she was one of three Welsh MEPs who “would not reveal the amount they spent on staff or transport” following a series of scandals over MEPs’ expenses.

In a statement published at the time, she said the expenses of all Labour MEPs were audited independently and that she continued to campaign for reform of the expenses system.

Morgan drew attention from lobbyists, who perhaps saw an opportunity in her relative inexperience. “The day after she was elected the telephone never stopped ringing and 50 letters arrived from lobbyists,” reported the “Current Politics and Economics of Europe” journal in 1999.

Van Hulten believes they were never likely to have much success with Morgan, who as the daughter of the Reverend Bob Morgan and Labour councillor Elaine Morgan, was raised in a vicarage.

“Religion plays a big part in her life and that of her family,” said the former MEP, who is godfather to Morgan’s daughter, Gwen, and has spent many holidays at the family’s home in St Davids.

“I think she came to politics from a very moral and ethical perspective in a way that wasn’t the case for other politicians, so I think that really helped define her and give her a moral compass which she has always stuck to, or tried to stick to.”

Financial reform

The Welsh MEP found it easy to have her ideas for financial reform heard at the European Commission, where the clean-up exercise was being led by Kinnock, who had not been implicated in the scandal.

Speaking on St David’s Day in 2000, she warned: “It is important that the Commission never loses sight of the fact that the reform process will be a complete waste of time unless it reconnects with the European public. That really has to be the sharp focus the whole time.”

Just two years later though, the Commission’s chief accountant, Marta Andreason, broke cover to claim the EU budget was still “an open till waiting to be robbed.”

When Andreason was suspended from her job, Morgan showed little sympathy, saying: “She broke every rule in the book by running to the press rather than following detailed rules agreed by both the Commission and trade unions on whistleblowing.”

Andreason went on to serve as a UKIP and then Conservative MEP between 2009 and 2014.

Morgan’s ability to work with politicians from other parties, and indeed other parts of her own party, will be key to her survival in a Senedd evenly split between the government and opposition benches.

“You have to work cross party in the European Parliament to achieve anything since no single group has a majority,” said one source who worked for a different political group. “So perhaps that’s quite relevant now.”

“My impression was of a very capable, diligent, sincere and hard working parliamentarian, who was well regarded by others.”

The European Parliament speaking records are full of praise from MEPs and Commissioners from different parties for Morgan’s legislative reports on culture, the EU budget and energy policy.

“I too would like to congratulate Mrs Morgan for writing this report, especially considering the remarkably tight deadlines that she set herself by falling pregnant,” said Chris Heaton-Harris, the former Conservative MEP and UK Government minister, in 2000.

Sinn Féin

However, her work on energy policy was criticised by another rising star of Celtic politics, Mary Lou McDonald, who is now president of Sinn Féin.

“I could not support today’s reports, which basically back the European Commission’s drive to liberalise the electricity and gas markets,” wrote McDonald in 2009.

“Our own experience in Ireland has shown how liberalisation and resulting privatisation have not provided solutions to any problems in the energy sector.”

Morgan did not endear herself to many in Plaid Cymru either by using her role to submit questions to the Commission designed to show independence was not a viable option for either Wales, Scotland, Catalonia, the Basque Country or Flanders.

In his speech to Plaid Cymru’s spring conference ahead of the 2009 European elections, former party leader Adam Price said: “Eluned Morgan – retiring from the European Parliament to spend more time with her karaoke machine – says nationalism is an evil and that those who desire freedom for their countries are to be despised, not admired.”

Partisan

One former member of the Welsh community in Brussels said they were not pleased that she was set to be the next First Minister.

“I have followed her career over the years and I have observed a very strong partisan tendency in her,” they said. “She is not likely to work well with anyone from outside her own party.

“As a firm Blairite, when Blair was Prime Minister, I can’t see her emulating predecessor, Rhodri Morgan, and trying to put clear red water between her government and Starmer’s. I liked and admired Mark Drakeford, and am very disappointed by his successors.”

Morgan’s Dutch socialist colleague, Michiel van Hulten, said she did not actively cultivate cross-party friendships but was not tribal and on good terms with those she needed to work with.

“She was probably a bit more to the left than me,” he said. “I was pretty much a Blairite. She was on the centre-left of the Labour group.

“I think what I always found quite striking is that she was absolutely a party loyalist but not an unthinking or uncritical one.

“She was always ready to challenge conventional wisdom and to challenge any instructions that would come from Downing Street on how to operate.”

Brexit

Morgan is of the same view as the UK Prime Minister when it comes to Brexit.

“She completely accepts the democratic decision that was taken at the referendum,” added van Hulten. “But I think that, like Starmer, she’s only concerned that the UK doesn’t burn all its bridges and, wherever it’s possible, to continue working with Europe where that benefits Wales.”

The Guardian predicted a “Westminster career could follow” for Morgan when she was first elected in 1994 despite her insistence that being an MEP “is all I want to do.”

In 2008, she was reselected by Labour to stand for a fourth term in the European Parliament, but announced later the same year that she was standing down to spend more time with her family.

“I seem to remember there was some disappointment when she left the European Parliament,” said former Labour MEP Richard Corbett.

“She was one of the Brits that could network, knew about Europe very well, understood it, had an international outlook, and spoke European languages.”

But, after 15 years of commuting between Cardiff, Brussels and Strasbourg, the then 41-year-old Morgan said she had found it “increasingly difficult” to spend up to four days a week away from her husband, Rhys, and their two children, Arwel and Gwen.

House of Lords

She continued to pursue her political career closer to home, being made a member of the House of Lords in 2011 before being elected to the Senedd in 2016.

Speaking to Nation.Cymru’s Associate Editor, Martin Shipton, on standing down as an MEP, she gave some prescient advice to members of what was then the National Assembly based on her experience in Europe.

“The thing you have to understand with the European Parliament, and generally the continental model of politics, is that you have to compromise,” she said.

“It’s something the Assembly is having to learn – that you don’t get entirely what you want, that you have to build in room for compromise, and you have to build quite a sophisticated kind of politics where you understand there will be a lot more give and take.”