A lost leader and a win for Welsh journalism

Delusional to the bitter end, Vaughan Gething – who has resigned as Wales’ first minister – continues to protest his innocence of any wrongdoing.

He may have lost the confidence of the Senedd, of his own party and of the Welsh public, but none of that was his fault, he would have us believe. According to him, his downfall was “politically motivated” and inspired by racism.

His diehard supporters may find it convenient to swallow his self-pitying narrative. The rest of us take a more realistic view of what he has done.

He accepted donations totalling £200,000 from a waste disposal business. What was extraordinary about this was not simply the staggering amount of money involved for an internal party election, but the fact that David Neal, the man who owns the waste company, had received two suspended prison sentences for dumping toxic sludge in the sensitive wetlands landscape known as the Gwent Levels.

Despite Mr Gething’s protestations that he had “done nothing wrong”, most people took the view that he had made, at the very least, a serious error of judgment in taking the money.

Concerns intensified when it became clear that he had been lobbying Natural Resources Wales – the environmental regulator – to go easy on one of Mr Neal’s companies. It also transpired that another of his companies had received a £400,000 loan from the Development Bank of Wales, the Welsh Government-owned bank that was overseen by Mr Gething at the relevant time in his capacity as economy minister.

Not to mention the fact that on the very day Mr Neal’s company donated £100,000 to Mr Gething, another of his firms submitted plans to build a giant solar plant to a Welsh government body.

Not once has Mr Gething acknowledged that there may be a perception that he was compromised by accepting Mr Neal’s money or that he had a potential conflict of interest.

No one forced him to accept money from Mr Neal and nor did anyone but Mr Gething himself write during the Covid crisis to ministerial colleagues, telling them he was deleting messages because they would be disclosable under the Freedom of Information Act. In deleting the messages he was disobeying explicit instructions from the Welsh Government to preserve as a record messages that might, indeed, need to be disclosed under FoI.

Subsequently Mr Gething misled the UK Covid Inquiry by stating in sworn evidence that messages were deleted not by him, but by the Senedd’s IT department when his phone was refitted.

Since February, when it was first disclosed by NationCymru that he had accepted £200,000 from a convicted criminal, the Labour Party has dithered about what to do about Mr Gething. He was elected leader of Welsh Labour in March and days later as first minister.

From the first day he took office he has been under scrutiny by the Welsh media. As the revelations kept coming, everything else in Welsh politics took a back seat. The opposition parties picked up on the latest exposes, but privately many people in Welsh Labour were also concerned and increasingly disenchanted with Mr Gething as leader.

He sacked a minister, Hannah Blythyn, wrongly accusing her of being the source of the leaked messages to NationCymru. Even some of his own supporters were shocked by the disdainful way in which he treated Ms Blythyn, whose mental health was affected badly by her unjust dismissal.

Mr Gething was defeated in a vote of confidence, but refused to resign, accusing the opposition parties of participating in a “gimmick”. Many saw this as an attack on the integrity of the Senedd and its parliamentary procedures.

Yet still the Labour Party tolerated his continuation in office. Why? Initially there was tribal loyalty coupled with inertia, and a recognition that Mr Gething’s relatively small number of supporters in the Senedd group would kick up an almighty fuss if moves to remove him were made. When the general election was called, there was a further motivation: nothing should be allowed to cause a distraction during the election campaign.

But concerns didn’t disappear, and Mr Gething’s behaviour became an issue on the doorstep. Opinion polls showed there was a differential in voting intention for the UK parliament and for the Senedd, where the next election is due in May 2026.

While Labour had enough of a lead in Wales to ensure that it won 27 of the 32 seats on July 4, its support in a Senedd election dropped to just four percentage points above Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist party, most of whose votes traditionally come from the Welsh-speaking west and north-west of the country. The drop in support was attributed to the unpopularity of Mr Gething, whose approval rating slumped to lower than that of Rishi Sunak, the outgoing prime minister of a discredited Tory government at Westminster.

Hailed when first elected as the first Black leader of any European government, Mr Gething will leave office as a discredited figure who lost control of his own narrative. In an age when fake news and conspiracy theories have increasing cachet for many, Mr Gething’s resignation came about because of the force of serious journalism.

Martin Shipton is associate editor of the news website NationCymru