Keeping Gething as First Minister could destroy Labour’s power base in Wales

Martin Shipton

The Labour Party’s failure to remove a First Minister who is fundamentally dishonest raises serious questions about its ability to govern Wales.

It’s five months since NationCymru revealed that Vaughan Gething had happily accepted donations to his Welsh Labour leadership campaign totalling £200,000 from a company whose owner, David Neal, had been given two suspended prison sentences for dumping toxic sludge in the protected wetlands landscape of the Gwent Levels.

And it’s more than two months since we disclosed that he had deleted Welsh Government iMessages during the Covid crisis and subsequently lied about it to the UK Covid Inquiry.

Along the way there have been additional disclosures by ourselves and other news outlets about aspects of these matters that raise serious cause for concern about Mr Gething’s actions and judgement.

Asked why he had donated such an extraordinarily large amount of money to the politician’s campaign, Mr Neal responded blandly that he considered Mr Gething to be the right man for the job. It was left to journalists to reveal that Mr Gething had actively lobbied Natural Resources Wales, the regulator, to go easy on Mr Neal’s companies.

Planning permission

Journalists also uncovered the fact that Mr Neal’s group had applied for planning permission to build what promised to be a highly profitable solar plant on land he owns on the outskirts of Cardiff.

The application was submitted on the same day that Mr Gething received a donation of £100,000 from Mr Neal’s group.

We also reported that one of Mr Neal’s companies had been granted a loan of £400,000 by the Development Bank of Wales – wholly owned by the Welsh Government – at a time when Mr Gething had oversight of the bank as Economy Minister.

However much the two men insisted there was nothing untoward about their association, Mr Neal’s reasons for donating to Mr Gething’s campaign were clearly more complex than a simple belief that he was the right man to be First Minister.

Further revelations in a Channel 4 Dispatches programme that Mr Neal’s group is under investigation for suspected tax evasion in relation to waste dumped in a landfill site have added to concerns about the links between them. They raise the prospect that Mr Neal donated money to Mr Gething that should have been paid in devolved landfill tax to the Welsh Government that he now leads.

Scandal

In recent weeks the attention has switched to another scandal in which Mr Gething is embroiled. Politicians and civil servants who use digital channels to discuss government business are under instruction to preserve the messages they write as a record because they could be subject to disclosure if a freedom of information request was made.

There has long been suspicion that some official material may have been deleted to avoid disclosure. However, no hard evidence had been available until NationCymru revealed in May that while Welsh Government decisions were being taken about how to deal with the Covid crisis, Mr Gething had admitted in writing that he was deleting iMessages because they were subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

Significantly, the admission was made not publicly, but in one of the messages he told ministerial colleagues he was planning to delete. When the UK Covid Inquiry began its work, it placed an obligation on government ministers and officials to disclose all documents of relevance to it.

Instead of admitting that he had deleted messages and shown some contrition, Mr Gething gave sworn evidence to the Inquiry in which he claimed that the deletion of messages had been undertaken not by him, but had occurred when his mobile phone was being refitted by the Senedd’s IT department.

Such mendacious behaviour is outrageous, especially from a government minister.

Outraged

Somebody was sufficiently outraged by Mr Gething’s incriminating message that they passed a screenshot of it to NationCymru, and we ran the story. Mr Gething’s reaction was not to admit that he had done wrong, but to offer a series of lame and contradictory excuses.

The “chat” he deleted actually related to a conversation that had taken place in a Labour Senedd group meeting, it was claimed, and it didn’t relate to government business at all, but to jocular remarks made about Labour MS Mike Hedges. Yet however much Mr Gething and his acolytes sought to push these spurious lines, they couldn’t get away from the fact that by stating the iMessages were disclosable under FoI legislation, they acknowledged that they related to Welsh Government business, in a way party discussions and banter between MSs would not.

In fact, the discussion related to a decision to change the way GCSE and A-level results were calculated during the Covid crisis, when students were unable to sit exams.

Deleting the messages entailed disobeying an explicit Welsh Government instruction and, as things turned out, amounted to destroying evidence that should have been handed over to the UK Covid Inquiry.

Mr Gething’s casual admission in an iMessage he never thought would enter the public domain inevitably raises concerns about what other documents he may have destroyed in this or other contexts.

We know from this episode that he is a liar. How can he be trusted to tell the truth if he was asked whether or not he had deleted other material? Surely this should disqualify him from being Wales’ First Minister.

As we know, instead of being candid about what he had done, he tried to divert attention from his misdeeds by turning the blame onto Hannah Blythyn, wrongly accusing her of leaking the screenshot containing the incriminating message to NationCymru.

Ms Blythyn was dismissed as a minister despite the lack of a properly constituted leak inquiry overseen by the Welsh Government’s director of propriety and ethics. Instead Mr Gething bypassed normal procedures in order to achieve the result he and his inner circle wanted, regardless of the damage to Ms Blythyn’s reputation and wellbeing.

Dignified

In recent days there has been a huge contrast between the dignified way in which Ms Blythyn conducted herself when making a personal statement to the Senedd and the typically arrogant response of Mr Gething.

A particularly egregious element of Mr Gething’s poor defence of his actions has been for him and his circle to accuse news outlets who have held him to account of racism. In this context, to adapt a famous quote from Dr Samuel Johnson, such an allegation is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

On Thursday a Senedd Labour group “away day” took place in Cardiff at which Mr Gething’s leadership was discussed. From what we have gleaned, no decision was made, although the meeting was acrimonious, with some MSs calling for his resignation and his core supporters vocally defending him.

Welsh Labour’s failure to deal with this crisis – the most serious political scandal in the devolution era – is causing it serious damage. Despite the general election results in Wales, which saw Labour win 27 of the 32 seats and the Conservatives wiped out, voting intention polls for the next Senedd election tell a different story.

One recently had Labour just four points ahead of Plaid Cymru. Mr Gething’s approval rating is also very low, showing him behind Welsh Conservative Senedd group leader Andrew RT Davies and Plaid Cymru leader Rhun ap Iorwerth. The scandals have clearly cut through with voters.

Deeply concerned

While many Labour Senedd Members are deeply concerned about the crisis in their party, they don’t seem to know how to resolve the situation. Unlike with Tories at Westminster, there is no constitutional mechanism for triggering a leadership election within Welsh Labour.

It’s understandable that during the general election campaign, UK Labour wouldn’t have wanted to precipitate a crisis in the Welsh party by withdrawing support from Mr Gething. It could have been a distraction that diverted attention from the core messages it wished to get across.

Nevertheless it has been embarrassing to see the likes of Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner making supportive statements about him that suggest he has done nothing wrong.

This hardly aligns with their agenda of cleaning up public life after the Tory years of Partygate and crony contracts.

If Mr Gething continues in office for much longer, Welsh Labour risks throwing away the hegemony it has enjoyed in Wales for more than a century. Any policy initiatives it wishes to take forward are being overshadowed by the continuing scandals involving the current First Minister.

There’s a cliche that when a leader is causing damage to a political party, they are visited by senior politicians described as “men in grey suits” who tell them it’s time to resign. The demography of senior politicians in the Welsh Government’s Cabinet is different now, with most being women.

The likes of Lesley Griffiths, Julie James and Jane Hutt, as well as Mick Antoniw, should now step forward and perform such a service for their party, but more importantly for Wales.