Elin Jones re-elected as Presiding Officer
Elin Jones has been re-elected to the post of Presiding Officer,
She beat the Conservative MS Russell George in a socially distanced secret ballot at a meeting of the Senedd – the first since last week’s election.
Jones, who is the Plaid Cymru Senedd member for Ceredigion, got 35 votes, while her opponent received 25.
The job of Llywydd, is to chair meetings in the chamber and act as the Senedd’s figurehead.
Elin Jones served as Llywydd in the last Senedd term after beating Dafydd Elis Thomas to take the role.
She was Minister for Rural Affairs between 2007 and 2011, and has been a member of the legislature since 1999 when it was created.
The Senedd is later expected to confirm Mark Drakeford as First Minister, after Welsh Labour won 30 out of 60 seats in the chamber.
In line with Covid-19 restrictions, the meeting has been held in a hybrid format, with 20 members allowed to sit in the Senedd chamber in Cardiff Bay, with the remaining 40 taking part remotely from their offices in the adjoining building Ty Hywel.
At the election, the Welsh Conservatives won 16 seats – their highest ever tally. Plaid Cymru won 13 seats, which is one more than it did in the 2016 election, while the Liberal Democrats won one seat on the regional list.
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Now that’s a role that could be restricted to a single term. Give someone else a chance to behave like a demented R.S.M !
If you assume that all of Plaid voted for her, and all the Tories voted for Russel George, that means at least 7 Labour members voted for the Tory. Interesting! McEvoy was an idiot but I did wonder whether her authoritarian streak was playing badly with others apart from him.
Of course it played badly. However her behaviour was directed by others, mostly within Plaid, whose dislike of McEvoy led to a willingness to obstruct his attempts to behave like an “Opposition” should. I believe that some of those unsavoury incidents also played badly out among the electorate who could see the damage done by petty obstructionism.
Bit of a shame isn’t it for the voters of Ceredigion not to have their MS speak for them for another 5 years. Still, at least we lost some of the worst dross.