Remembering Sarge

Published in the Llanelli Herald on 15th November 2017

The death of my colleague Carl Sargeant has hit me like a tonne of bricks.

Carl’s suicide was a tragedy. The circumstances surrounding it are now thankfully the subject of an independent enquiry led by a QC, so I won’t get into my views on this other than to say that mistakes were clearly made and it’s important that this is properly examined.

Suicide is now the single biggest killer of men aged under 45 in the UK (Carl was 49). In 2016, men accounted for 82% of all suicides in Wales.

Bereavement has a devastating effect on families, friends and colleagues. In cases of bereavement by suicide, feelings of devastation, incomprehension and guilt are often magnified with the impact felt across communities and generations.

I know all of us in the Labour group in the Assembly are dumbfounded by what happened, and in his own community there is a lot of anger and upset. I completely understand this, and hope that with time, and with the answers that I hope will flow from the inquiry, they will get some peace of mind.

Carl was the centre of his community. He was the Assembly Member for Alyn & Deeside in Flintshire, and someone who still lived on the council estate in Connah's Quay where he was raised.

He was not an off-the-peg politician. He was rare in modern politics to rise from the factory floor, without a University education, to the cabinet table. And he was living proof that you don’t need a college degree to succeed in life; he was an able Minister and held the record for being the Cabinet Minister to pass the most laws in our Welsh Parliament since its inception.

I first met him in 2003 when I was a journalist and he had just been selected as a candidate for the Assembly election that year. He was a mobile DJ doing discos in his area and didn't seem like a typical AM, but as I quickly observed in his early years in the Assembly he had a natural knack for people and politics.

When I became Director of the green transport charity Sustrans Cymru and led the campaign for a law to ensure a network of paths for walking and cycling he was the Minister I had to persuade. We developed a respect for each other but he was no push-over.

When I became the candidate in Llanelli he came to campaign for me and was brilliant on the doorstep - he was just himself, warm, natural and funny.

We had a lovely visit to a pensioner on Bigyn Road in Llanelli who had benefited from a home installation project he had championed, and a great morning at the Links mental health charity on Queen Victoria Road where he shared with the people there how he had begun to crochet to help him deal with his own feelings of stress and minor depression.

His death hasn’t fully sunk in for me yet. But I know I’ll miss him, and so will Welsh politics.