In many ways, Mark Drakeford’s greatest success and failure was the pandemic.
Having announced that he would be stepping down it is worth reflecting on the issue that will ultimately shape his legacy. You can define the soon to be former First Minister’s pandemic by contrasts.
The first contrast was one of profile. Before it he was a complete unknown. Barely anyone in Wales would have been able to pick him out from a crowd. Between March 2020 and when he announced the Christmas lockdown nine months later he had become one of the most recognisable faces in Cymru.
READ MORE: The 29 things a Covid inquiry absolutely must look at into how the Welsh Government handled the pandemic
READ MORE: How to sign up to a brand new newsletter that help you understand Wales better
Perhaps the biggest contrast was the one between him and then Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Both men would stand up in their daily coronavirus briefings to deliver an update on both the state of the virus and their plans to combat it. The differences couldn’t have been more stark.
Whereas Johnson was blase (“I shook hands with loads of Covid patients”) Drakeford by contrast was cautious (“think not what you can do but what you should do”). While Johnson was clearly not across his brief (“will putting a hair dryer up my nose get rid of Covid?”), Drakeford was forensically obsessed with details (he would often quote from random academic papers). While Johnson had parties in Downing Street (“I was assured they followed the rules”) Drakeford shielded to protect his mother in-law in a shed at the end of the garden and said “I like cheese”.
It was this contrast with Johnson more than anything that accelerated a boom in Drakeford’s popularity. During Covid people were scared. They feared for themselves, their loved ones and their jobs. What they wanted was an adult to step up and at least appear to take things seriously. In an age where people want their leaders to have a “personality”, Covid was perhaps the only time when a seemingly boring social policy professor would be able to win plaudits, praise and a degree of adulation.
Some people like to act like Mark Drakeford is above the pettiness of politics. But this is not true. He is an overtly political animal who has been, at least during Covid, good at managing public opinion and how he is perceived. He quickly realised that appearing different to the Boris Johnson led UK Government was going to be a vote winner.
And boy howdy did he ride that wave. Despite saying that he wanted the different UK nations to work together closely, the First Minister went to great lengths to point out how they were different. Various versions of “unlike in London, in Wales we don’t rush, we look at the evidence” were regularly issued.
This isn’t to say that all of the differences were deliberately orchestrated or done cynically. Unlike Boris Johnson (and several other Welsh Government ministers) who would deliberately try and evade tough questions about the virus response, Mark Drakeford appeared to have a genuine desire to explain and help people understand his decision making. This was when he was at his best. This desire to explain to the public, in a clear and accessible way, why he was doing what he was doing, at a time of huge uncertainty made Drakeford more real than the politicians media trained into oblivion.
But the self assuredness that allowed him to do that was also one of his great undoings. The confidence turned into hubris over several issues. We have seen time and again that Mark Drakeford is convinced that he is the cleverest person in the room. More and more over the years this has translated into an aversion to scrutiny and some really poor communication over certain policies.
You can find more analysis by signing up for the Will Hayward newsletter here.
The first big example of this was around the ban on selling non-essential items during the ill fated firebreak lockdown. The reason for the ban was because it wasn’t fair on small retailers that supermarkets could sell items they couldn’t. But it was poorly explained and came at a time when people were really starting to get sick of being told that they can’t do things that six months before were an essential basic freedom.
But in echoes of what we would see from the 20mph limit, instead of introspecting about what the issue with the policy was or whether it was communicated well, he doubled down. Legitimate question was met with infuriating condescension. The “how dare you, I know better than you” stock response has been a well he has gone to increasingly in recent years and it is not a good look for any leader. Especially when presiding over a failing NHS, a struggling education system and awful levels of child poverty.
Covid also exposed another of Drakeford’s shortcomings - over caution and slow decision making. Clearly it is hard during a pandemic to toe the fine line between being serious about protecting people’s liberties and protecting their lives. No one is saying this isn’t a tough line to tread. But there were occasions when his caution strayed into diverging and lack of decisiveness.
We saw this with schools which were closed for far longer in Wales than other parts of the UK. There were times when the virus was relatively repressed but the doors of Wales’ schools stayed shut. The whole of the Welsh economy was locked down longer than in England during the summer of 2021 when the virus was hugely repressed.
But as often he is cautious, he is also slow to show prudent caution. The Welsh Government were slower than England to arrange priority shopping for vulnerable people, they failed to test a-symptomatic people going into care homes for weeks after the evidence said they needed to and they locked down far too late and for far too shorter time in the autumn of 2020 despite the scientific advice.
There was good and bad in Drakeford’s response to the biggest crisis Wales faced since the Second World War. Under pressure that he would never have imagined when he ran to be Welsh Labour leader he oversaw Wales’ impressive vaccine rollout, a far more effective contact tracing scheme than what we saw in England and led his party to a cracking Welsh election in 2021. But he also oversaw an administration which, seen in a global context, performed really poorly.
Yes it is hard to manage a virus in a country that has high levels of poverty, a creaking transport network and Welsh NHS already struggling. But these issues were already within the Welsh Government’s gift to fix before the pandemic. Covid simply threw into sharp relief many of the problems the Welsh Government had failed to fix.
The failure to have a Welsh inquiry
Perhaps the greatest contrast of the whole of the Covid period, and the one that taints Drakeford’s reputation most, is the failure to have a Welsh Covid inquiry. The one relentless theme from the First Minister throughout the crisis was that the UK Government needs to respect devolution and Welsh democracy. He called for more powers and resources to be allocated to Wales to allow the Welsh Government to do its job and “protect people”.
But then, when the dust settled, it was he who gave the biggest affront to democracy in Wales. You can't claim the credit without shouldering the blame and the refusal to really dig in to what happened in Wales risks tainting his legacy more than any mistakes made under pressure ever will.
The most loved and hated man in Wales: How Covid defined Mark Drakeford
3
0
13.12.2023
In many ways, Mark Drakeford’s greatest success and failure was the pandemic.
Having announced that he would be stepping down it is worth reflecting on the issue that will ultimately shape his legacy. You can define the soon to be former First Minister’s pandemic by contrasts.
The first contrast was one of profile. Before it he was a complete unknown. Barely anyone in Wales would have been able to pick him out from a crowd. Between March 2020 and when he announced the Christmas lockdown nine months later he had become one of the most recognisable faces in Cymru.
READ MORE: The 29 things a Covid inquiry absolutely must look at into how the Welsh Government handled the pandemic
READ MORE: How to sign up to a brand new newsletter that help you understand Wales better
Perhaps the biggest contrast was the one between him and then Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Both men would stand up in their daily coronavirus briefings to deliver an update on both the state of the virus and their plans to combat it. The differences couldn’t have been more stark.
Whereas Johnson was blase (“I shook hands with loads of Covid patients”) Drakeford by contrast was cautious (“think not what you can do but what you should do”). While Johnson was clearly not across his brief (“will putting a hair dryer up my nose get rid of Covid?”), Drakeford was forensically obsessed with details (he would often quote from random academic papers). While Johnson had parties in Downing Street (“I was assured they followed the rules”) Drakeford shielded to protect his mother in-law in a shed at the end of the garden and said “I like cheese”.
It was this contrast with Johnson more than anything that accelerated a boom in Drakeford’s popularity. During Covid people were scared. They feared for themselves, their loved........
© Wales Online
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Nikkei Editorial
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Rami G Khouri
