The Fall of Vaughan Gething, the Welsh Liz Truss
As Eluned Morgan settles into her role as the new First Minister of Wales, it’s clear that she has had a much more stable time in office— as you’d expect from a baroness— than her predecessor Vaughan Gething, who is the only reason Morgan is in her new role. Gething will go down as an intriguing and self-destructive figure in Welsh political history. He lasted 138 days, from March to August 2024— nearly three Liz Trusses if you used her tenure as comparison.
For context, Wales has a devolved parliament known as the Senedd, though it is not as powerful as Scotland’s own Holyrood. Welsh Labour has dominated in Welsh elections, with their lowest result ever being 43% of seats in 2007, and they’ve won the most seats and headed every government since the assembly’s inception in 1999. Since the 2021 election, Labour had been in a co-operation agreement with Plaid Cymru, a left-wing Welsh nationalist party which pushes for Welsh independence.
Side note, Plaid Cymru’s leader Rhun ap Iorwerth did fantastically in the UK-wide 2024 election debates. He was openly opposed to the rhetoric of Nigel Farage and ReformUK, unlike some other debate participants, and he appeared more to the left than Labour or the Liberal Democrats on some issues. Any who,
Mark Drakeford resigned as First Minister, the head of government, in March 2024 after over 5 years in office, and Vaughan Gething won the subsequent leadership election. He was not only the first black First Minister of Wales, but also the first black leader of any European country. But his troubles begin even before he takes office.
Gething’s leadership campaign had accepted a £200,000 donation by a firm which had committed environmental offences, illegally discarding waste on conservation site Gwent Levels, a total antithesis to where Labour stands on green energy. This is bad enough, but the timing was especially poor because of the recent controversy around Conservative donor, Frank Hester. In the months prior to the 2024 general election, it came out that Tory donor Frank Hester had allegedly said that looking at Diane Abbott makes you 'want to hate all black women' and that she 'should be shot'. Abbott is the now Mother of the House, and was the first black female MP in the House of Commons— although Hester's representation has said this quote is distorted and is a mischaracterisation.
Labour at the time capitalised on the bad press for the Tories, and urged them to return the money he had donated. Whether you consider destruction of nature and racism on par with each other in terms of negative morality, the refusal of Gething to refuse this money shone a bad light on him, seemed like Welsh Labour was being hypocritical, and saw the dirty paws of corruption sneak into the now 25–year–long Labour administration in Wales.
Another snag was the endorsement of candidates by trade unions. Due to some odd rules, which a candidate claimed ‘unfairly blocked’ their nomination, Unite were unable to endorse anybody but Gething, to which one anonymous Unite official described as ‘a shocking mess’— Gething had only been a member of the union for a few months.
Problems arose then when the Covid Inquiry was under way in Westminster. Gething had been the Welsh Health Minister during the COVID19 pandemic and was under investigation for his handling of events. He had stated that he never deliberately deleted messages from his phone but he had no access, the exact same excuse that many senior Tory MPs had done, including Boris Johnson. Nation.Cymru however allege that Gething purposely deleted messages, obtaining a message from him in a government group chat where he said, “I’m deleting the messages in this group. They can be captured in a [freedom of information request] and I think we are all in the right place on the choice being made.” which raised several suspicions.
Gething seems to lack the political instincts in other leaders though. He didn’t try to diffuse the situation, make more excuses, or cover it up— instead he sacked one of his cabinet ministers, Hannah Blythyn, who he believed had leaked the messages obtained by Nation Cymru. The sacking of a cabinet minister is a major event, and it was obvious this was why, and kept the blatant corruption in the public consciousness for weeks. Blythyn, of course, denied this.
I have never met Gething and I am sure he is a lovely man in his private life, but when watching him explain the sacking of Blythyn, he seemed cold, condescending, patronising, and somewhat manipulative of the situation, and I felt sorry for Blythyn for being at the centre of this political implosion. Even if she had leaked it, she was exposing the First Minister’s lies and attempted evasion of a government inquiry, which was the right decision to take.
Plaid Cymru withdrew from the co-operation agreement with Labour and exited the government. To be precise, Labour held 30 out of the 60 seats in the Senedd, so technically they didn’t need PC support, but their parliamentary confidence was on a knife edge. Making active enemies with an ideologically similar party like Plaid Cymru was a dangerous move for Gething. The Welsh Conservatives sensed danger for Labour, and tabled a motion of confidence just two weeks later, where Plaid Cymru pledged to vote against their old friends. Gething lost.
A quirk in Welsh procedure means that losing a vote of no confidence doesn’t mean you have to evacuate office— though it is very clear that you are not welcome. Adding insult to injury, Gething lost 27–29, with some of his own party members absent, one of which was Blythyn herself who called in sick. Pretty rich of party leadership to assume that an MS who you threw under the bus would stick their heads out for you in a confidence vote, but perhaps she was legitimately ill.
The election campaign which was initiated days later overshadowed a lot of the political pressure on Gething to resign, but he didn’t escape scott-free. Four cabinet ministers, and this is Wales so there aren’t many cabinet ministers to begin with, began a government exodus akin to that which Johnson experienced during his twilight hours in July 2022. Mick Antoniw, Julie James, Lesley Griffiths, and Jeremy Miles all stepped down— Miles came second to Gething in that March leadership election. Gething finally took the hint, and resigned.
That ends a very short political career, and one which encapsulates the problems of a one-party state in Wales, and any country. Gething was a Starmerite who seemingly only cared for power and a continuation of the status quo. He had been the finance minister under Drakeford, and like any party facing decades of incumbency the main question is, ‘why haven’t you done it already?’ There are many parallels to Boris Johnson throughout his time in office, which should be concerning for everybody. Is it time for Wales to change course and vote for a left-wing alternative to the ailing Labour party? Plaid Cymru has made clear it knows how to make positive, more progressive, and more radical changes to Wales— will the absurdity of the Labour administration this year lead to a resounding victory for Plaid Cymru in the upcoming 2026 Senedd elections? We can hope.
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