51. Mark Drakeford on Labour success, Tory PMs, and Welsh nationalism

Alastair and Rory are joined by Mark Drakeford, First Minister of Wales and Leader of Welsh Labour, to talk Boris Johnson, devolution, Welsh nationalism, Scotland, the secret of Labour’s century of success in Wales, Covid, Brexit, Latin and more. Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Blackpool live show tickets: Saturday 8th October: wintergardensblackpool.co.uk/events/the-rest-is-politics-live/ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

  And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creef. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

  I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/risterspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/risterspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:35Alastair Campbell?

  Now, we're delighted to have an interview with the First Minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford. And please don't be too surprised if we don't talk about the Queen or King Charles, because the interview was conducted shortly before the sad demise of Her Majesty.

• 2:00Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 2:04Rory Stewart?

  And me Rory Stewart.

• 2:06Alastair Campbell?

  And a very special guest. We are absolutely delighted to welcome the First Minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford. Mark, hello and thank you for being here.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Very pleased to be here.

• 2:15Alastair Campbell?

  Now, can I kick off? Because every time I read about you in any sort of profile piece, the word Corbynista gets attached to you and I can see from the grivers that that probably irritates you a bit. But I just want to get a sense of your politics. If we accept that Jeremy is, say, on the left of the party and my old boss Tony is on the right of the party, where are you putting yourself adjacent or between them?

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Well, I think of my own politics as being derived from the radical Welsh tradition. And that can go back as far as Lloyd George and gets handed down the generations via Anirin Bevan, Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock. It's that strand in Welsh politics which is to the left of the centre. But all of politics in Wales is to the left of where it would be across the United Kingdom. And insofar as I think of myself as belonging to a tradition, it is to that radical strand in Welsh politics.

• 3:23Rory Stewart?

  Mark, can you help me on this? Because I'm obviously an ex-Tory talking to you and a lot of this is alien to me and I'm trying to understand the world you grew up in. So you're somebody who's been described as an atheist republican socialist. Is that roughly right?

• 3:39Speaker 02

  I'm not brave enough to be an atheist. I'm an agnostic.

• 3:45Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  The other things would be true.

• 3:48Rory Stewart?

  The other things would be true. And when you were growing up, you was a very dominant figure, actually even when you were an adult. Because you came, I think, into elected politics surprisingly late. We're in a world where... Most of the last lot of prime ministers have gotten in their 40s or early 50s. I think you didn't become an elected member till you were in your late 50s, did you? You had a whole separate career as an academic in West Wales. But I've noticed that this big figure called Jack Brooks, who seems to dominate a lot of talking about the early 80s in Wales. And I'd love a sense of what Labour politics in Wales felt like in the late 70s, early 80s, when you were beginning to get involved, what kind of character he was, and how it's changed. I mean, how would Jack Brooks think about the Welsh Labour Party if he was to turn up today? Maybe you could tell listeners a bit about Jack Brooks

• 4:33Rory Stewart?

  before you tell us a little bit about, answer that question.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I became a councillor in my 20s. Jack was the leader of South Leicron council during the time that I was a councillor. So I certainly saw him in very close quarters. He was, if you contrasted modern politics to the politics that Jack grew up in, then it was pretty much a sort of male dominated, probably boss led sort of politics, you know, where big beasts dominated local councils across Wales.

• 5:05Rory Stewart?

  And was he a boxer? He, he very interested in boxing, wasn't he?

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, no, he was. He was a plasterer by, by training. If you wanted to learn something about him, I'll tell you a story that he used to tell, which was going out as a young man in his, you know, early 20s to a nightclub in Cardiff. He's all dressed up, he's ready for a night out. He sees a young woman across the floor and she's looking at him and, you know, he thinks, well, my night could be turning up a bit here. And, you know, she comes across the floor to him and says to him, oh, you're Jack Brooks, aren't you? And he thinks, he definitely thinks the night is getting better. And she says to him, you're

• 5:51Speaker 02

  the kid who used to have free school meals. And I think it's that sort of experience really, which shaped him and would have shaped many other people in the Labour Party, you know, that sense that people. Are not to be shaped by their origins and that the job of the party is to provide the chances for people to be able to make the very most of their talents and their abilities.

• 6:17Rory Stewart?

  Just one more sort of push at this before I bring back Alistair. Help us understand the idea of a sort of boss figure in early 80s politics, but it's not too sensitive. Maybe this is too sensitive, maybe you're going to be offending Labour Party listeners by talking too frankly about this, but I saw a glimpse of this in politics in Scotland in the in the 90s when things really felt as though they were run by bosses. What what did that feel like in terms of how things were run and operated?

• 6:43Speaker 02

  Shall I tell you a story that appeared in the Guardian obituary of Lord Haycock?

• 6:48Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  So Lord Haycock ran the old Glamorgan County Council and, you know, nothing moved without Lord Haycock having ordained that it should move. And the story in the obituary was of two Jehovah's Witnesses knocking the door of his home, this outside Port Talbot. And Lady Haycock comes to the door and the two Jehovah's Witnesses say to her, does the Lord dwell in this house? To which she is alleged to have replied, yes, he does, but he's out watching Aberavon at the moment. And I think that might give you just a flavour of what it was like to be a dominant figure

• 7:32Speaker 02

  in Welsh local governments a long time ago now. It's very different now.

• 7:36Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think we we've talked on when we we did a special episode recently about when Liz Truss was made Prime Minister and we were talking about the fact there have been now three Conservative women Prime Ministers. Do you think that historically the male dominance of the Labour Party and the trade union movement has has been part of a legacy that has made it more difficult for Labour to find a woman Prime Minister?

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Well, I think it is part of our our history, but we are capable of amending it. You know, I lead a Labour group in the Senate, which is 17 women and 13 men in it. There are five women in my cabinet and four men and women fill all the major sorts of ministerial positions and not in any way confined to what you might have thought as the traditional responsibilities that women would undertake. So, you know, that is a very steep change to the sort of world in which. My early experience of Labour politics in Wales would have been shaped. So we are capable of amending our own history and we need to go on doing that.

• 8:40Alastair Campbell?

  Now, we don't want to talk too much about the wretched Boris Johnson, but I got the sense of your relationship with him being very, very difficult. What do you think the relationship between a First Minister of Wales and a UK Prime Minister should be? And what hopes do you have for a better relationship with Liz Truss? And how realistic do you think that is?

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Well, the fundamental word is that it needs to be respectful. So I've worked with a series of, you know, different Prime Ministers, including Conservative Prime Ministers. And I think there was a very big contrast between relations with Theresa May, when she was Prime Minister, and with her successor. I disagreed with Mrs. May on almost anything you'd like to say and, you know, was terribly frustrated at what I thought was her fundamental mistake in regarding Brexit as a winner takes all sort of referendum. But I would describe her as an instinctive Democrat. If you were in a room with her and she was Prime Minister,

• 9:41Speaker 02

  she would make a conscious effort to make sure that anybody in the room who had a view they wanted to contribute had an opportunity to contribute that view. And, you know, that is a sort of instinctive respect for the range of different individuals and experiences that you will you will come across. So I think it is perfectly possible to have good, effective, constructive working relationships with people who are in a different party from you and occupy a different position. But it's got to be founded on a basic sense of respect and parity of participation. Wales is a small country. It is not the same as

• 10:22Speaker 02

  a country the size of England. But parity of participation is something different. You know, every voice has a right to be heard and to be treated respectfully.

• 10:32Alastair Campbell?

  And you felt that Johnson didn't treat you with respect?

• 10:35Speaker 02

  On an individual level, on the rare occasions that I had direct conversations with Mr Johnson, he was courteous, he wasn't disrespectful in that way. But his approach to the future of the United Kingdom was very different. Theresa May, in her final lecture in Edinburgh, described the United Kingdom as a voluntary association of four nations. I think that was the end of quite a long journey, probably, for her. Boris Johnson believed that the way to save the United Kingdom was to assert muscular unionism, bully boy Britain, as you might more pejoratively put it, in which the way

• 11:19Speaker 02

  to secure the future of the United Kingdom was to show who was boss. And actually, that was completely counterproductive and contributes to the fragility of the United Kingdom, rather than helping it to be something which people choose to belong to, want to belong to.

• 11:34Rory Stewart?

  Can I come in quickly on this? You're somebody who describes yourself as a federalist or a unionist. But I guess there were some people who were quite shocked to see you, as it were, get into bed with Plaid Cymru. And I wondered whether that was something that gave you any moments for pause or reflection before you did it?

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Well, it would only be shocking to somebody outside Wales. My party's been in power in Wales throughout the history of devolution, but we've never won more than thirty of the sixty seats on offer. So we have always had to work with other individuals and other parties in order to be able to get the job done. We had a full coalition with Plaid Cymru in 2007, where Rodri Morgan, one of my predecessors, was the first minister. What we have learnt is, as a party in Wales, is that working with other progressive parties is not something to regard as unusual or difficult. It's challenging, but it can be done.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  We've demonstrated that it can be done. The current cooperation we have with Black Henry is designed to allow us to deliver on the most radical parts of our agenda, things which I think are very difficult to do if you're a party on your own, and certainly a party that has only half the seats available. So I know at a UK level, the idea of working across parties is regarded as, you know, somehow a failure of the system.

• 13:07Rory Stewart?

  No, no, no, no, no. Let me push back a little bit, Mark. It's not not that, I mean, I was part of a coalition with Lib Dems. I think it's the problem of working with a party that's explicitly committed to independence.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Well, obviously, I fundamentally disagree with them on that point. I believe in strong and entrenched devolution, where decisions are made as close to people as possible. But I also believe that the United Kingdom is better off for having Wales in it, and Wales is better off for being in the United Kingdom. But that's because we choose to belong to it, because we think there are important purposes that we discharge better together. Well, I disagree with Black Henry on that. We fought an election only a year or so ago where that choice was very explicitly with people. That doesn't mean that there aren't very important things that we are able to agree on and can work together, as we would

• 14:02Speaker 02

  see it, you know, for the benefit of the people who have elected us.

• 14:06Alastair Campbell?

  We had we had Keir Starmer on the podcast a few weeks ago, Mark, and he, I think he disappointed both of us really in that he didn't seem to share our belief that politics was now potentially so broken that there has to be at least a debate about some pretty major political and constitutional change. And to be fair, you have been putting out some ideas for further reform of the constitution and further form reform of of democracy. Do you not think that Labour nationally is across the UK is missing a bit of a trick in playing into this worry about the state of our politics, rather than actually defending the status quo?

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Well, I think Keir Starmer did a very important thing in commissioning Gordon Brown to lead a piece of work which will range over a series of these really important constitutional questions. I've had a chance to stay pretty close to the work of the commission. I was talking to Gordon about it last week. I think when it is published, you know, it will set out a prospectus for Labour that will

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Give us the the arguments that are needed and the rigor of debate behind it. But will, I think, you know, be provide quite a radical prospectus for the future of the United Kingdom. And I have to say, I I'm never interested in constitutional questions because they are constitutional questions.

• 15:32Rory Stewart?

  Hmm.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  I'm interested in them because they are the way in which we are better able to solve the problems that face people in their daily lives. That's why we should be interested in them because they give us the basis for doing that.

• 15:45Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, to take take one example then, I mean, one of the problems that we certainly feel in Westminster is that the existing parties feel very, very tired. And one of the reasons why certainly I support proportional representation is to give room for new, fresher parties to emerge, to break up some of those old structures, to give voters a chance to be a bit more entrepreneurial and maybe to provide a bit of challenge to some of those old stuffy parties and make them step up their game rather than assuming that they can continue to have a two-party dominance. So looking at the horror of the last decade or more and the way how stultified Westminster politics feels, I would have thought proportional representation is a real solution to a problem.

• 16:30Rory Stewart?

  It's not constitutional change for its own sake.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  Well, I I work in a proportional system. You know, the Senate is elected under a system of P R and we have proposals to reform the way the Senate is elected that would make it even more proportional. So I have no problem at all with that argument. You know, I I'm a bit heretical, I've said it in the past, that I think you can make a good argument for saying that administrations that have people from more than one tradition in in them have a level of internal challenge. That means by the time you come to put your ideas in front of the wider electorate, they are better ideas because they've already had to be tested with people who don't come at the problems from exactly the same way as you do or your party does.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  So in terms of trying to, you know, not have a stultified, narrow debate that just sticks within the parameters, I think our experience in Wales in which, you know. In every election, we've had to work with other people. The challenge that brings with it is actually good for democracy and I think improves the quality of policymaking.

• 17:39Alastair Campbell?

  If would you not be happy if you felt that there was actually quite a lot of cooperation right now between Labour and the Lib Dems about how best to get rid of the Tories at the next election because it seems to me the country is desperate to get rid of the Tories, but the system is not going to make that easy.

• 18:00Speaker 02

  The system doesn't make it easy. The system drives people into tribal ways of doing things and we compete for people's votes up and down the country. So, you know, you're right. It's a it's an uphill thing to try and rest on cooperation. I think I've been involved in devolution for the whole of 20 years. I was an advisor to Rodri Morgan from the very beginning. And I do feel one of the things I have spent 20 years doing sometimes is trying to remind my own colleagues that the fault line on the floor of the Senate is between progressive parties on one hand and the Tories on the other. That is the fundamental fault line.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  And we shouldn't act as a Labour Party on the floor of the Senate in ways that drives some of the more progressive voices closer to the Tories because we don't appear willing to be able to talk with them, explain with them, learn from them, all of those things. You know, a fundamental fault line in Wales is between the three quarters of the electorate who vote for parties of the centre left and the quarter of the Welsh electorate that votes for the Conservative Party. And, you know, that's the fault line we should be working on. People on the non-Tory side of it, of course, should be able to talk together.

• 19:49Speaker 03

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• 21:19Rory Stewart?

  Now, you're meant to be a famous example of this kind of technical thing of avoiding pasokification, which is this horrible jargon word for listeners who are not staying on top of it for PASOK, the Greek left-wing party which managed to get wiped out, went from having almost half the vote to almost no vote at all in a few years, half a dozen years.

• 21:41Rory Stewart?

  What lessons should we draw about what happened to Labour in the Red Wall, what happened to Labour in Scotland, but didn't happen to Labour in Wales? And I'm going to challenge you to try to be a bit bit less political. You're being quite polite all the time. But if you had some real reflections.

• 21:57Alastair Campbell?

  He's a very polite man. That's one of the reasons why he's popular in Wales, Rory.

• 22:01Rory Stewart?

  Some reflections on what went wrong in the Red Wall, what went wrong in Scotland. Lost the SNP in Scotland, lost to the Tories in Northern England.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Well, Rory, because I'm often asked, and you answer it the way I always do, which is that I'm never here to teach other people lessons. I'm very happy to share the Welsh experience. And sometimes there will be things in in that that other people will find useful and they can they can draw on it. But I don't approach it on the basis that we have done things that allow us to tell other people what to do. But in November of this year, it will be 100 years since Labour first won a majority in a general election in Wales. And we've never not done that since.

• 22:43Alastair Campbell?

  Happy days, happy days, happy country.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  And the Conservative Party has never won an election in Wales ever, ever since 1832 and the onset of, you know, universal suffrage. The 19th century was dominated by the Liberal Party, the 20th century by the Labour Party. So I'm very lucky, you know, I'm.

• 23:02Rory Stewart?

  But but Mark, just to interrupt, that that also broadly speaking is true of Northern England and Scotland. Again, the same shift from Liberals to Labour, the Conservatives were never dominant forces in Northern England or Scotland.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Well, actually, that's not true either, Rory, is it? You know, if we're just trying to be accurate about it. The Tories won elections in Scotland in the 1950s.

• 23:21Rory Stewart?

  They were not a dominant force. They were not a dominant force over the century. That was a very exceptional result. That was a small exceptional result. Primarily, Scotland has been on the left.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  Primarily, but not exclusively. And Wales is the only party, part of the United Kingdom where exclusively that would be true. Now, why have we can, why have we managed to continue to do that? Well, here are here are three or four qualities which I think have helped with that. First of all, just hard work. Let's not forget, you know, I do a little turn sometimes when I'm talking for the Labour Parties that say, you know, people get attracted into the Labour Party because it's ninety percent inspiration. You know, they want to achieve something, they think this is the way to do it, and ten percent perspiration. Uh, when you get into it, most of politics is, you know, perspiration. Uh, and just the sheer slog of making sure that you're always talking to people, you're knocking doors, you're

• 24:16Speaker 02

  answering the phone, you're having those conversations, and we're very lucky in Wales that we are the only party who is able to put people out on the streets to do that work, and we earn every vote we get. You know, I want nobody to say to me, they vote Labour because they've always voted Labour, or because their father would turn in his grave if they didn't vote Labour. I want people to vote Labour because we have persuaded them, we go on, you know, convincing them that that's the right thing to do, and we earn the votes that we, that we have. I think we're very lucky because we've been in power, then we have credibility when we say to people at an election that this is, these are the things we would like to do for them. Because we're able to show them that we've done those things already.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  You know, the fact that you can point to your record and say, we told you last time this is what we would do, and look, here's how we did it, gives us a credibility with Welsh voters that is much harder to do when you're in opposition.

• 25:14Rory Stewart?

  So, so Mark, let me, let me, let me tighten my question. Why do you think Labour voters voted Conservative in Northern England?

• 25:21Speaker 02

  I think there were a constellation of circumstances that meant that that was happening. It happened in Wales as well. We lost seats, um, the whole Brexit fatigue, the entirely false claim that there was a deal that would just get Brexit, uh, done. But to go back to my point about earning votes and showing people respect.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  I think sometimes in some parts of the country, Labour has been in danger of looking like we don't really like the people who vote for us. But they vote for us, but we don't, you know, we're slightly shamefaced about the support that we get, and I never want that to be true in Wales.

• 26:04Alastair Campbell?

  Do you mean by that, Mark, that you think there were parts of the country where we just assumed that people would vote Labour because they always had done, and we didn't really take their interests into account, whether that was over cost of standard of living, or immigration, or some of the language and the style of politics? What do you mean by that?

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Well, I'm afraid people got that impression. Whether it was true or not, I'm sure they were very hardworking people, you know, representing those areas for Labour who weren't at all that. But somehow we conveyed the impression to people, that we took for granted the fact that they would vote for us. And we weren't always backing to show how proud we were, that we had earned that support and proud of them. And, you know, I am proud of every person who votes Labour in Wales.

• 26:51Rory Stewart?

  So, Mark, just to be cheeky, if this was Alastair a few weeks ago, he would say, if you look at the records since 1980, elections basically go Tory, Tory, Tory, Tony Blair, Tony Blair, Tory, Tory, Tory, Tory. And the conclusion that one might draw from that is that the lesson for Labour is that it needs to be much more New Labour, much more Tony Blair. And that's not your tradition. So I wonder what you'd answer to that challenge.

• 27:18Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not sure I'd put it exactly like that, by the way.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  Let me give you two other qualities which I think have helped us in our success. And the one links to what I've just been saying, which is identity. To be Welsh and to be Labour are two identities that sit on top of one another very comfortably.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  And we work hard to make sure that we sustain that. And, you know, I think we have to work harder in some places to say to people that to be a Labour supporter somewhere, you know, is an identity that works for your locality and for your town. You know, to be Labour in Luton is an identity that tells you that the Labour Party is interested in on the side of, keen to represent the people who live in that area. So I, identity, I think, is a very important component in our success.

• 28:12Alastair Campbell?

  But Marg, was that not once the case in Scotland? I mean, I can remember, you know, growing up from a very Scottish family, that was felt to be what, you know, people felt Scottish and Labour and those two identities were very much, it felt the same. I mean, could you ever envisage a, a, a period in history where that might disappear in Wales and what do you do to guard against that?

• 28:33Speaker 02

  Well, I can imagine it because I've seen it happen in Scotland and, you know, I, we work very hard indeed to say to people that you don't have to show your Welsh by voting for a nationalist party. Uh, you can reaffirm your Welsh identity by voting for Welsh Labour. Because we are as Welsh as you are and determined that that identity goes on being part of the relationship between you and us. But then my final point, and this goes more to Rory's question, is that I think we try and speak in a voice and with a set of policies that are authentically Labour as well.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  That will be clear to somebody who's interested that these ideas and the way we talk about them comes out to that Labour tradition. Uh, I do think that people respond to, you know, a sense of authenticity about a political party. And sometimes I will mean saying things that you know not everybody will agree with. But they are what you believe in and you are there to talk about the things that you believe in and to make the case for them. And to do that with that sense of authenticity. And I think that has been on our side as well.

• 29:46Alastair Campbell?

  Did you think that we, we knew Labour, as it were, under Tony Blair, went too far in that kind of neoliberal, pro-globalisation?

• 29:56Alastair Campbell?

  Private sector direction and that that started to send confusing signals about what Labour is and what Labour, to use your word, authentically is.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  I think what is authentically Labour in Wales, you know, is different to what is going to appeal to people elsewhere where there isn't the same tradition and the same sort of class structure and so on. You may remember, I was at Rotherham, gave a lecture early on in devolution, which I have to admit, having had a hand in writing for him, which talked about clear red water.

• 30:29Alastair Campbell?

  I do remember it.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  And that was going to set out, you know, a distinctive agenda for Labour in Wales, which was not part of marketisation, not part of a sense that, you know, the way you improve public services was by allowing people to become serial shoppers, so choice agenda and so on. Now, that is not because he or I believed that that was the right prescription for elsewhere in the United Kingdom, but we knew that those things would resonate with people who look to the Labour Party in Wales.

• 31:03Rory Stewart?

  But Mark, some of these things are national. I mean, you're opposed to Triton, right? When Keir Starmer's in favour of Triton, that's not particularly Welsh, that's a global nuclear weapon. I mean, that's a... So you're taking positions on things that go well beyond the traditions of a particular part of the United Kingdom.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course, we all have long histories of views and that was my view and is my view, but it's not part of what I do as the First Minister of Wales because I have no responsibilities in that field. And, you know, I do my best to spend my time working on the things for which the Senedd and myself as First Minister have responsibility. And I try, while I'm doing this job, you know, not to get drawn into debates about things that other people have to discharge because the responsibilities belong to them. But it doesn't mean that my own ideas and my own beliefs have changed.

• 32:00Alastair Campbell?

  Mark, if Scotland did become independent, or if we did have a United Ireland and Northern Ireland... Became part of the Republic. I know these are both massive ifs, but if you were to sort of rank them in order, I think that the likelihood of Northern Ireland border pole is probably first, and I think then an independent Scotland probably second. But how does Wales, how does Wales shape a future then as, as sort of this bit on the end of England? And I don't mean that disrespectfully, but I mean, that, that could happen. I just wonder how you think about

• 32:32Speaker 02

  that. Well, those are really important questions, and we're having to address them directly in a way that we never needed to do previously. And that's because I think, you know, the risk that the United Kingdom will not continue is greater today than at any time in my political lifetime. I certainly don't think it's inevitable. I think there is an offer about the United Kingdom. It's a Labour offer, in my view, that people would wish to buy into. You know, they would see the advantages that the United Kingdom can bring. We are desperately short of an articulation by any other party of the positive case for a voluntary union. We have had to set up a commission. It's chaired by Rowan Williams and by someone called Laura

• 33:17Speaker 02

  McAllister, who's a distinguished professor here in Wales. It's asked to look at two questions. First of all, if the United Kingdom stays together, how can we better organise ourselves to make sure that it goes on being a success? But then it has a second question, which is that if the United Kingdom starts not to stay together, what are the options for Wales? Because the idea that, you know, everything else continues, Scotland leaves and everything else continues as though that hadn't happened, is clearly not plausible at all. We've never needed to do serious thinking about what the choices for Wales would be, and the commission will help us to do that. But we're having to map out that

• 33:58Speaker 02

  territory with a seriousness that I think just reflects the risks that we, we currently face.

• 34:05Alastair Campbell?

  How would you define the independence debate right now?

• 34:09Speaker 02

  In Wales, it's still very much a minority view. You know, we, in our election in May of last year, it had the virtue of real clarity about it. You know, I would stand on platforms that the debate at the BBC would be broadcasting. I would have somebody on my right who believed in abolishing devolution altogether. And the BBC gave them equal prominence, despite the fact they'd never won a single seat in any election. But there they were, as though they were an equal player. And on my left, there would be Adam Price, the leader by Camry, who absolutely explicitly fought the election on the basis that a vote for him was a vote for independence. And, you know, I was the advocate of, as I say, strong and entrenched devolution

• 34:54Speaker 02

  in a successful United Kingdom. And there's no doubt at all where the centre of gravity in Welsh opinion lies. There is a growing interest in independence because of the risks that are there to the future of the United Kingdom. That's inevitable, but it would still be a, of a small minority, but no more than 20% or so.

• 35:16Alastair Campbell?

  Can I just ask you briefly about Covid? Your, your profile and the profile of, of devolution rose during Covid. And there were certain things that you did very differently. But ultimately, the UK government does control the purse, purse strings. And I just wonder how you feel about the way that the post Brexit, you were Brexit minister in the Welsh government, how the post Brexit strategy, insofar as there is one, of the UK government, impinges upon you? And whether you fear that ultimately you end up having to impose austerity, whether you like it or not, because of that relationship and, and how you get round that politically,

• 36:00Alastair Campbell?

  given that we are going into what looks like being an incredibly challenging time economically?

• 36:05Speaker 02

  Well, we continue to struggle with Brexit every day. Its adverse impacts on Wales are palpable. And it doesn't have to be like this. There, you know, I would have preferred that we stayed inside the European Union altogether. But once the decision was made, I always believed it was possible to devise a set of circumstances in which we would have left the political. Side of the union, but we would have continued to have had access to the single market, part of the customs union, defended our economic interests in that way. And, you know, we desperately need a government who believes in working alongside our European partners

• 36:48Speaker 02

  rather than a constant pattern of provocation. But on the issue of austerity, you know, we've had a decade of austerity.

• 36:57Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  We've had a decade of austerity. I was very proud to knock doors in Wales during the two thousand and seventeen election, for example, because Labour's manifesto contained so many things that we were already doing in Wales. We promised free prescriptions. We've had them since two thousand and three. We said we would reinstate education maintenance allowances. We've never abolished them in Wales. We said that we would restore nurse bursaries. We've kept them in Wales. You know, I could list a whole string of things for you that we managed to do within the budget that the Tory government gives to us. We do that by making the choices that

• 37:39Speaker 02

  we would make as a Labour government. We prioritise the things that we think, you know, leave money in people's pockets.

• 37:46Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  So that they can manage the other parts of their lives. And we do it in the conditions of austerity. So that will become more difficult.

• 37:55Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, yeah.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  But, you know, in the end, you have political choices to make.

• 38:00Alastair Campbell?

  You said there, you talked about the damage that Brexit is doing, the consequences being palpable. Do you not share my frustration that the Labour Party nationally still seems to sort of have this great elephant in the room? They don't really want to talk about those consequences. And if Labour's strategy is to be a strategy of growth, as Keir Starmer keeps saying, surely there has to be a much more open debate about how we deal with those consequences?

• 38:28Speaker 02

  Well, Brexit is a threatening topic for politicians because of its divisive nature, and you don't want to reopen old wounds and to spend your whole time trying to, you know, repair again that damage. I am absolutely sure that, you know, the next Labour government will take a very different view, not on Brexit itself, that's done sadly. We're, you know, we've got to just face up to that. But we'll take a very different view to how we conduct our relations with our nearest and most important partners. You know, most importantly economically, we will want to have a cooperative set of relationships with, again, based on mutual respect, but will recognise that the interests

• 39:12Speaker 02

  of Welsh farmers are not served by trade deals far flung on the other side of the world, but are in allowing Welsh farmers to be able to export their fantastic produce to people in the Southern Mediterranean who were our biggest customers and who now can't buy from Wales because by the time the food gets there, it's no longer fresh or fit to sell.

• 39:39Alastair Campbell?

  We're coming to the end of the time and thanks for giving us so much of your time and sorry for the technical hitches at the start, but before I maybe give Rory the final question, I just want to give my final question. You have said that you'd stepped down during this term, i.e. before 2026. Is that a definitive done deal?

• 39:57Speaker 02

  Well, I haven't changed my mind. I think one of the, one of the things that, you know, has helped really is that I try and answer questions if I'm asked them as best I can. And it was always my plan really that by the time I was halfway through this Senate term, I'd be nearly 70 years old by then. It astonishes me, but it will be true. They will be, it will be right, you know, to hand on to somebody who has the next 20 years in their sights. And we've done that very successfully in Wales. You know, Cadwain handed on to, Rodri handed on to Cadwain during a term, Cadwain handed on to me during a term. I plan to do the same somewhere in the second half of this term.

• 40:43Rory Stewart?

  Mark, thank you so much for coming on. Last little one for me. Do you feel that being in politics damages people? I felt it was terrible for my mind, my body, my soul. I think I ceased to be a proper human being. I ended up talking to people as though they were voters all the time. Do you think it's had any impact on your character?

• 41:02Speaker 02

  Well, I'm a politician by accident rather than by design. I never set out to do what I do now. Does it change how you are? Well, inevitably it does, doesn't it? Because.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  It's not possible for me in Wales, at least, to go anywhere incognito. If you're out, there will be people who will come up to you, they'll want to talk to you, they'll want to share their views. On the whole, as you know, most people are astonishingly polite. As you know, just genuinely interested in wanting to have those encounters with you and you have to regard that as part of the privilege of the job. My wife went to Tenby, a big Welsh tourist place recently without me and came back and said how glad she was to that I wasn't there. And she didn't mean that in a nasty way to me. She just meant that she was able to go and just do what she wanted to do

• 42:04Speaker 02

  without us being stopped every few yards by people wanting wanting to talk. It does change you. It doesn't have to change you for the worse. You know, you just have to regard it, as I say, as part of the privilege of the job that you do.

• 42:18Alastair Campbell?

  And final, final, final question, Mark. Have you kept up your Latin? I'm fascinated by people who study Latin to the extent that you did.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I I try to a little bit. I only ever managed to do it in the summer. One of the things that I promised myself in the summer when I have a chance is I will spend if I'm walking, which I try and do a fair bit about, then I will learn some poetry as I go along. It's part of keeping your mind busy and I I will occasionally go back and find some piece of Catullus or something and remind myself about it and try and commit it as best I can to to my memory.

• 43:01Alastair Campbell?

  Well, thank you for talking to us. I've thoroughly enjoyed it. I hope you have.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Thank you very much.

• 43:05Alastair Campbell?

  And we'll maybe do it again another day. All the best.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  Thanks a lot.

• 43:07Alastair Campbell?

  Thank you. Bye bye.

• 43:10Rory Stewart?

  So Alice, what did you think of that?

• 43:13Alastair Campbell?

  I really enjoyed that. I thought he was frank. Obviously, he is, he is a politician. He's the first minister and he's not going to dive into really difficult areas where he doesn't necessarily want to make news. But I thought he was very thoughtful, reflective, and yeah, I enjoyed it.

• 43:32Rory Stewart?

  So Alice, one of the things that I thought was fascinating was just this little glimpse into, and obviously I was obsessed with it, this kind of glimpse into Labour politics, the 70s and 80s, these kind of big, big characters, because there were a lot of them in Cumbria too. Going a long way back, there was a guy called Lord Adams of Ennordale, Jack Adams, who was the kind of great hero of Cumbria in the 1930s, 1940s, brought a lot of the money in, got a lot of the projects going, but quite kind of, some of their reputation, quite kind of authoritarian, quite autocratic in the way they ran things.

• 44:07Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And that, I think that style of politics has been very common throughout the UK, various periods of history. I loved listening to Neil Kinnock talk about some of the big characters in Welsh politics. And no, I thought, I thought he was very, he does have a, it's interesting, you said to him about, you know, he was very polite. He does come across as being very mild mannered.

• 44:31Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Well, it's a brilliant technique, isn't it? It's a brilliant political technique because what he can do is he can sort of be very gently truthful and hint at his views without really creating a story. So clearly, he's massively left wing, but he's got, he had a very elegant line there, didn't he? Well, you know, was my views in the past? Then he conceives it is my view now, but not really my responsibility, is it?

• 44:56Alastair Campbell?

  Responsibility, yeah. But I thought, you know, I saw he handled the You know, because it's true. When we were in number ten, and I can remember Rodri Morgan was a great character, he really was.

• 45:08Alastair Campbell?

  He used to, he used to turn up for his meetings with Tony Blair, carry, I remember one of them, he turned up literally carrying his papers in a Tesco shopping bag. And so it's just, he was a very, I really liked Rodri, but he, but and Mark was, I remember Mark was responsible for that. He drove that strategy of what you call clear red water of being different. And that could be a bit irritating for us because, you know, you, you, you're at, you're sitting there at the centre, you think you're all powerful, Tony Blair's the leader of the Labour Party, the Prime Minister, and you've got these guys down in Wales, sort of, it feels a little bit like, you know, potshots. But actually, when you hear him explain it, as he did there, you can see the rationale, you can see the strategy behind it.

• 45:48Rory Stewart?

  Kind of worked out for them, didn't it, didn't it?

• 45:50Alastair Campbell?

  And I, I just love the fact that we have part of our United Kingdom, which has been so trashed by these people, Conservatives. And we've got this part of the United Kingdom, which has had a Labour in power for a century. It's a wonderful, wonderful story.

• 46:03Rory Stewart?

  I also wonder whether the lesson that maybe he's trying to draw, but he's too polite to say, is that if Scottish Labour had been prepared to be more courageously left wing, and maybe Northern Labour had been prepared to be more courageously left wing, they wouldn't be in the situation they're in now. But to hold those bases, they needed to stick hard on the left.

• 46:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, possibly saying that. I think he was also saying that the, you see, I think the, the other thing, I mean, Scotland,

• 46:27Alastair Campbell?

  so many of our big national figures have come from Scotland. And look, plenty of national, big national figures have come from Wales as well, but I think he was, he was maybe saying that there was too much of focus in, in the UK Labour Party, the Scottish politicians on the UK, whereas he was saying there were a lot of Welsh politicians who really, really focused on Wales.

• 46:47Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 46:48Alastair Campbell?

  But I thought he, I can see why, I can see why he remains popular, even on the basis of that chat.

• 46:53Rory Stewart?

  I'm with you. The other thing I would have had a go at him on, if I'd, if I'd thought I'd make any progress on it, but as you say, he's too polite and smooth to do it, is this question of all these devolved governments. It's true of Sadiq Khan as Mayor of London too, which is that they Are in these very odd positions because they don't have much control over a lot of things and that allows them to blame the conservative government for a lot of stuff without having full responsibility for it. It's quite a kind of clever thing to be in. So they can take the credit for anything that goes well and anything goes badly, they can say that's not our fault, it's the fault of the other lot.

• 47:26Alastair Campbell?

  Politics Rory, it's called politics.

• 47:28Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, but can you ever solve that with devolution? Because it makes accountability quite difficult. I remember, you know, with Sadiq Khan trying to say signaling's not been done up on the pick a lily line since I was doing some independence since the 1970s and knife crimes rising and you're meant to be responsible for transport and housing and crime. But the answer was always Tory cuts.

• 47:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and it is. And also, there's no doubt at all that the Johnson government has had a strategy for trying to undermine Sadiq Khan that has included targeting the funding of some of the things that he is responsible for. I just think that's why these relationships do matter. And I do think that, I mean, again, he was even, Mark was even very polite about his relations with Boris Johnson. He clearly can't stand the guy.

• 48:12Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, no, that was, that was pretty peculiar, wasn't it? Very polite about Boris Johnson.

• 48:15Alastair Campbell?

  Only basically, he made it absolutely clear Johnson showed no respect whatsoever.

• 48:19Rory Stewart?

  One wonders, yeah, one wonders around the dinner table what actually he thinks about Boris Johnson or even of Tony Blair.

• 48:26Alastair Campbell?

  Indeed, indeed. Well, we know what he talked about, thought about Boris Johnson because he was caught on camera in one of those fly on the wall documentaries saying how awfully he was. Anyway, I enjoyed that. I'm glad we did that.

• 48:37Rory Stewart?

  Well, thank you for doing it.

• 48:41Speaker 06

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