Andrew RT Davies is a hypocrite and a charlatan – and that’s my unbiased opinion

Martin Shipton

Andrew RT Davies doesn’t like being exposed as a hypocrite and a charlatan. He also has a strange view of what freedom of the press amounts to, and deserves to be called out over it.

The former Conservative group leader at the Senedd, he’s now a much diminished figure, reduced to echoing the dog-whistle script of Reform UK MSs with much less experience than himself. Reform, after all, has nearly five times as many MSs as the Tories.

For many months RT, just like Reform, has been attacking the Welsh Government’s Nation of Sanctuary programme. Such attacks give the impression that the beneficiaries of the programme have been trafficked to Britain on small boats, when in fact 91% of the funding has gone towards resettling refugees from Ukraine.

The racism is bad enough, but what makes RT’s stance even more reprehensible is that when Ukrainian refugees arrived in Wales following the invasion of their homeland by Russia, he was happy to join in the welcoming.

Not unreasonably, Nation.Cymru has taken him to task for such brazen hypocrisy. Perhaps RT thinks people won’t notice his egregious conduct. What’s certain is that he can’t cope when it’s pointed out.

The other day he launched – not for the first time – an attack on this news outlet. He asked Plaid Cymru’s Culture Minister Heledd Fychan whether she considered Nation.Cymru’s output to be “politically neutral”, going on to say that outlets that are not politically neutral should have government funding withdrawn.

It’s no secret that in recent years the Welsh Government has provided financial support to a number of news outlets like Nation.Cymru, in the same way as it does to other industries, like farming.

Over the years, there is no doubt that RT will have received considerably more public sector financial support than Nation.Cymru for his family farming business in the Vale of Glamorgan.

Like many others, the Welsh Government has recognised that the news industry is in crisis. The arrival of the internet, with most newspapers giving their content away free of charge online, conditioned people to believe that news didn’t have to be paid for.

Media companies’ revenue plummeted and they reacted by massively reducing the number of journalists they employed. This led to a situation where many communities were starved of news coverage, and significant decisions affecting people’s lives went unreported.

Following representations from the National Union of Journalists and others, the Welsh Government accepted that it needed to intervene. It decided to make contestable grants available to new news outlets, one of which is Nation.Cymru. The grants were made at arm’s length by the Books Council of Wales to minimise the risk of political interference.

With the help of the Welsh Government, but also subscribers and advertisers, Nation.Cymru is well read and has won awards. Currently it holds the title Welsh Online News Site of the Year.

Supporting industry and creating jobs is an essential role of the Welsh Government, and there is no reason why news outlets should be exempt from such assistance or – as RT is advocating – subject to censorship.

This website would be very boring and unattractive to readers if it were forced to conform to the kind of strictures RT favours.

Nation.Cymru is regulated by the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), whose Editor’s Code requires that outlets should always be accurate in their reporting. Naturally, we always seek to be so.

But that’s not enough for RT. He wants the Welsh Government to assume the role of a “super regulator” and make judgements about whether news outlets that have received public funding – and especially Nation.Cymru – are politically biased.

Such a proposition is deeply flawed and wholly impractical. RT clearly doesn’t understand how public interest journalism of the kind Nation.Cymru produces is essential for Welsh democracy.

We consider it our responsibility to hold politicians to account for their words and actions, regardless of which party they belong to.

If RT wants to avoid being criticised, he should cut out the racism and stop behaving like a hypocritical boor. He can rest assured that for as long as he carries on in the same vein, he will be exposed by us.

Shortcomings

In the run-up to the Senedd election, there were numerous articles to write about the various shortcomings and worse of Reform UK candidates. According to RT, we doubtless displayed bias by writing them. (He may be a Tory, but his common cause with Reform on their favourite issue the Nation of Sanctuary makes him a TINO – Tory In Name Only).

Perhaps we should have displayed “neutrality” by not writing the stories at all, or held back on some of them until some discreditable information came to light about other parties’ candidates. (As it happens, we did run negative stories about other parties’ candidates, demonstrating that we will hold politicians of all parties to account).

RT should also know that from the very early years of newspapers, it was commonplace for partisan opinions to be expressed in their pages. This isn’t a drawback, but a positive virtue.

What sort of journalism does RT like? We don’t have to speculate about this, because he’s made his position clear.

His favourite news outlet is GB News, a grotesque parody of a public interest broadcaster on which right-wing interviewers ask right-wing commentators to comment on right-wing, dog-whistle topics.

Hardly a template for bias-free content. RT has been on it quite a bit, though not so much recently, presumably because of his diminished status.

GB News

Three years ago he led the charge of outrage when the then Presiding Officer Elin Jones removed GB News from the CCTV feed at the Senedd. He claimed the broadcaster had been banned, failing to take account of the fact that anyone in the Senedd could tune in via the GB News website, if they felt like a dose of right-wing propaganda.

There’s another reason why RT has it in for Nation.Cymru. Five years ago, when I was working for the Western Mail, I was tipped off that officials of the Senedd had carried out an investigation into RT’s employment of his wife as his personal assistant.

A number of people who had worked for the Welsh Conservatives claimed she had done little or no work for the salary she was paid out of public funds. Senedd officials concluded there was a prima facie case for RT to answer, and referred the matter to the then Standards Commissioner.

The Commissioner, who later resigned after a tape recording emerged in which he made inappropriate comments to someone who had complained about a Senedd Member, decided not to take the matter further.

Employee

I made a Freedom of Information request, asking for the report on RT’s employment of his wife to be disclosed to me, but the request was turned down on the basis that I was seeking disclosure of personal information relating to an employee. I appealed, arguing that it was a standards matter rather than an HR matter, but the Information Commissioner ruled against me.

The Commissioner stated: “The data subjects (particularly Mrs Davies) have a reasonable expectation that sensitive details about her employment and job performance would not be published. Whilst Mr Davies has less of an expectation of privacy due to his public role, because his personal data in this case is inextricably linked to that of his wife, it would be distressing and intrusive into their family life to disclose the information.

“ …As a public facing figure, Mr Davies would not have as high a general expectation of privacy as his wife. However, in this case the personal data of Mr Davies is intertwined with that of his wife and disclosure of Mr Davies’ personal data would lead to the disclosure of the personal data of Mrs Davies. Furthermore, both Mr and Mrs Davies have expressed concerns that disclosure would cause them both significant distress.”

The Commissioner concluded: “The data subjects (particularly Mrs Davies) have a reasonable expectation that sensitive details about her employment and job performance would not be published.”

Whenever I see or read a comment from RT complaining about the waste of public money, I think of this case.