Politics
The transcript of Episode 6 of 'Y Pumed Llawr - The Fifth Floor
I’ve been speaking with former Special Advisers, civil servants and Ministers to try and explain the inner workings of politics and government in Wales to help students get a richer understanding of how the machine works. The full set of transcripts have been published by Cardiff University and you can find the link in the notes.
I recorded these free-flowing conversations, and many of the people you’ll hear, are speaking on the record for the first time. Each episode considers a major pressure that confronts you when you step out of the lift at the top of Ty Hywel.
_____________
So here you are, a Government Minister, sitting in your office on the Fifth Floor, trying to address a problem. Let's assume you’ve successfully prioritised, got your officials on board with your preferred solution, identified money to fund your policy, and got agreement from local government to work with you on implementing it.
What have you forgotten?
[Tom Woodward]
What the party, what the backbenchers are thinking and MPs are thinking, and whether they're on board and bringing them with you, and feeling informed seems to have been absolutely huge, I think - just because of the smaller number of people in Wales. This is really important. In a way that if you've got a big, super, big majority in in Westminster, you can kind of crack on? You've got to bring people with you in Wales obviously.
Tom Woodward was a special adviser under three different First Ministers and knows only too well that in a political environment politics matters.
In a parliamentary democracy the executive relies on the consent of the legislature.
And Ministers only have an office on the Fifth Floor with the support - or at least acquiescence - of their colleagues on the 2nd and 3rd floors.
A wise Minister pays attention to the concerns of their colleagues in the Parliament.
As Lyndon Johnson famously observed, 'The first rule of politics is to be able to count'.
It is one thing for a Minister in a Government with a big parliamentary majority to be insensitive to backbench concerns. But when the arithmetic is more fragile they’d be very ill-advised to take their own side for granted
[TW]
I know the amount of times I was in a meeting and I want to do something, and I get told by someone else, well, actually, name three names - backbenchers - are not going to be happy with that. And I think ‘what the hell they bloody know about this? I've just been working on this for six months. They've just heard about it for half an hour’ [laughter]. You know, actually that initial reaction, but obviously is absolutely important. These people have to vote, and they have to back and speak publicly, saying this is the right decision. And obviously I'm saying that flippantly and as a joke. They would have known probably about the issue, but I would be told, ‘Well, go back and think again, because it's not going to fly’.
It is not easy to codify what sets the nerves of the backbenches on end.
It will depend on the public mood, what is coming up on the doorstep when they canvas, what local party members are getting exercised about in their monthly gathering, what the opinion polls are showing, whether an issue is getting the attention of opposition parties in the Senedd, if trade unions are raising concerns, or if MPs are muttering to their Senedd counterparts.
There are countless straws in the wind.
Some of it is high politics, some low. Some about genuine policy differences, some about personalities.
Is a Minister getting too big for their boots - are they ensconced on the fifth floor and not spending enough time in the tea-room, taking too long to answer letters or reply to text messages, believing their own press releases and getting a little grand.
An effective Minister is attuned to this, and will invest time in these relationships.
It can be tempting when you are on the Fifth Floor, and absorbed with matters you think are strategic and weighty, to forget the old maxim that all politics is local.
And all Senedd Members have been elected as the voice of their constituencies - and, crucially, have an equal vote. A particularly important point to remember when you are a Minister in a minority Government.
Sam Hadley worked closely with me closely with and understood the importance of the role of the Special Adviser as a link
[Sam Hadley]
There's the kind of engagement with backbenchers as well, which, you know, to be fair to you, you were always on my case about, and I think is really important. Just kind of doing your best to make sure that they feel involved, engaged, have the information that they need. And that can be quite tricky at times, because you're balancing what can seem like really big stuff - you know, the stuff you know, the stuff that you're sitting in the meetings with the minister talking about, you know, ‘do we fund this or not? How do we kind of get through the budget’, all that stuff. And then suddenly down on the micro level and dealing with, you know…
LW
..Level crossings
SH
Yeah, exactly, yeah.
Understanding where the shoe is pinching locally is critical for any Government. And whilst some Ministers can be dismissive of their backbench colleagues as irritants who should keep their mouth shut and simply obey the party whip, a wise Minister will go out of their way to nurture relationships.
A key point of difference between the Westminster Parliament and the Welsh Parliament is size.
There are 650 MPs in House of Commons, and 122 Ministers. The Senedd has 60 members and there are 12 Welsh Ministers. From 2026 that will rise to 96 Senedd Members and 14 Welsh Government Ministers.
The dynamics are completely different. In the current House of Commons there are more than 282 Government backbenchers - 223 of whom are newly elected.
Current Westminster Minsters won’t know the names of many of their colleagues, let alone have a relationship.
In the much smaller Senedd, the governing Labour Group has 30 members. An altogether more intimate relationship.
The dynamic is complex. There are inevitably a range of views and personalities. After all politics is not a quite team sport, it is competitive.
But politicians are tribal. And instinctively come together - especially when they think the tribe is in danger.
Something that is often forgotten is that politicians are human.
Nobody understands the oddities of political life better than your colleagues. It is a lonely profession, and small acts of kindness, supporting each other when life gets difficult, counts for a lot.
As does listening and engaging when you have local issues, or policy concerns.
As well as being good government, it is good politics - you’ll need all the goodwill you can get when the water gets choppy, and you need your colleagues to come to your rescue.
Here’s former Minister Lesley Griffiths
[Lesley Griffiths]
A year into the first Assembly Rhodri Morgan formed a full coalition with the Liberal Democrats to get stability until the end of the term, and he did it again with Plaid Cymru in 2007.
When Carwyn Jones emerged from the 2016 elections with 29 of the 60 seats for his party, he turned to the solitary Liberal Democrat, Kirsty Williams, to join the Government. In a constitutional innovation they formed not a coalition, but a ‘progressive agreement’. Kitsry Williams became a Liberal Democrat Minister in a Labour Government. And it lasted the full five years, surviving a change of First Minister and a pandemic.
Carwyn Jones did the same with the sole independent Senedd Member, ex-Plaid Cymru leader, Dafydd Elis Thomas. He brought him out of the cold and onto the fifth floor. His support came with few strings attached.
But as part of her terms of agreement Kirsty Williams insisted she had the freedom to take a different view to other Ministers when it came to issues that were not devolved to Wales. And on a weekly meeting with the First Minister to address tensions as they arose
KW
I remember when I first met with Carwyn Jones and I was trying to set out my terms. And I said, ‘and I need to see everything’. And he said, ‘believe me, you do not want to see everything’. And I was like, ‘no, no, no, no, I need to see all the papers that you see’. And he's like, ‘I'm telling you now that is just not manageable’.
But those weekly meetings were really, really important. So there would be issues coming up. Some of them were like the ‘known knowns’. So I always thought I'd have to quit because a decision would finally be made about the M4. I thought that would be the time I'd have to leave.
LW
I hadn’t realised that was a ‘walk the plank’ issue.
KW
Yes
LW
If I had I wouldn't have gone to so much trouble if I’d realised!
[Laughter]
KW
Oh, no, don't say that. So yeah, we always worked on the basis that I'd have to leave when that happened, because the party would not stand that. So there's lots of things the party,
LW
And Carwyn Jones knew that, but he was going ahead anyway?
KW
Yeah, he was going ahead anyway. But as it came to pass, that didn't happen, and I didn't have to go. But that's what we were always working to. We figured we'd have that time in the government, and then I would have to leave, because there was no way the Liberal Democrats would put up with that. So they were like ‘knowns’ like that.
And then obviously there are events that come up within the context of the Welsh Government, and you've got to try and handle that. But then there's, like, the other stuff that's going on in the world. So obviously, there were often votes around Brexit on the floor when I was the Minister. You know, it used to drive the Tories mad, in particular, where I would not vote with the government.
Because that's an arrangement that I'd come to with the FM, obviously collective responsibility applied when there were matters that the Welsh Government were responsible for, that were devolved. But if it was outside of that, and it wasn't a devolved issue, I was allowed to have the flexibility and the freedom to vote in the way I wanted to. It used to drive the Tories mad, they used to put up little memes and things on social media, but they were always a source of great hilarity to me.
The politics of cooperation are very familiar to every First Minister, but the machinery of the Welsh Government can still struggle to break out of the Westminster mold. Tom Woodward came into Government with Kirsty Williams from the Liberal Democrats as her Special Adviser
[TW]
One thing I will make as a wider point was that it took a long time for the civil service to get used to it. The Civil Service has had the same government for over 20 years. So that does blur the lines a little bit of ‘what we've achieved together’ - ‘we’, as in what the Welsh Labour government, and whatever people has joined them - and civil servants. So the lines that you've used to defend what you've done, everything is actually all as one.
And Kirsty had spent however many years criticising all sorts of policies. You know a basic example would be, correspondence goes out, or doesn't go out, but would come up to her and it says, you know, ‘we're extremely proud that we have did blah blah blah in 2010’. and she's like, ‘I criticised that. In fact, I said we should scrap it’.
That was an interesting case study. You know most civil servants in Westminster, they're used to government's changing. And you just change with that. It'd be fascinating to know if there was completely a different party in Wales, how the civil service would move, because it's not done it before, and it's defended the same record.
But veteran civil servant John Howells has a different take. In his experience officials take the various permutations thrown up by Senedd arithmetic in their stride
[JH]
I think over time I developed the view that it was part of the deal if you were a civil servant supporting the government in Wales. History shows that there haven't been that many periods of absolute majority for one party, coalitions - or things that look a bit like coalitions - are therefore part and parcel of the way we do business. So it's a responsibility of the civil service to to support the delivery of government across what can be tricky political divides.
I was Director of Culture, responsible for the Welsh language legislation brought forward during the Labour / Plaid One Wales Government, when a Plaid Culture Minister, Alan Fred Jones, was responsible for legislation in relation to the Welsh language within a government, which had a Labour First Minister and a Plaid Deputy First Minister. That government had established a way of working which enabled difficult bits of business to be cleared at a political level before being put into the government machine.
I had to accept that one of my responsibilities was to manage the politics of whatever particular aspect of the legislation might be under consideration, but it didn't seem to me to be completely at odds with the way I was used to doing business, reporting to a minister from a previous government that was in the same party as the First Minister, because there were well established rules for dealing with the politics.
At the 2021 elections Labour equalled its high watermark winning 30 of the 60 seats, but First Minister Mark Drakeford didn’t want to put himself at the mercy of the fickle forces of parliamentary moods and struck an agreement with Plaid Cymru. Another constitutional novelty, just short a coalition: a Co-operation agreement based on an agreed programme of reform.
And in exchange for the smaller party supporting Labour in key votes, Plaid Cymru had two of its politicians given a place within the government as ‘designated members’, granted a small team of their own special advisers and a civil service support unit, to jointly work on delivering the agreed policy agenda - but with the ability to operate as a normal opposition on any matters not covered by the deal
Dafydd Trystan was one of the Plaid Cymru special advisers
[DT]
I think by and large, it was relatively easy, because Ministers on both sides - the Ministers and the two ‘Designated Members’, for the most part, had shared principles when coming to tackle an issue. So on the Plaid side, Cefin Campbell and Sian Gwenllian were there, and then Jane Hutt amd Mark Drakeford were key in shaping the cooperation agreement on the Labour side, but then also a large number of Ministers worked with the Plaid ‘Designated Members’ to make things work.
I think on the whole, it worked well, if not very well. And this is just a personal reflection from the inside if you like. There's an interesting one which I kind of reflect on that at times, the Ministers who had the strongest ideas were at times, the more difficult to work with, if you like. And that's not a criticism. But if you had a Minister who had a very clear idea of what they wanted to do, which wasn't necessarily aligned with what was in the Cooperation Agreement, then negotiating that was somewhat more difficult than a Minister who agreed in principle was quite happy for the cooperation agreement detail to be worked on by civil servants and a team of Special Advisers, and more or less, as long as that process had been gone through, they'd sign off what would come from it. Whereas some Ministers had far clearer ideas of exactly what they wanted to do, and it didn't involve this.
So I think for the most part, it worked very well, but a lot of that comes down to a shared set of principles and policies where you could argue about a particular part of the program, or a particular line, or a particular subset of the policy proposal, but overall, there was a confluence of principles and policies that meant it worked pretty well. And I don't know if you've spoken to Ministers or special advisors from the Labour side about the cooperation, but I'd hope they'd say something pretty similar about the progress made. I mean, there were difficult discussions at times, but hell I'm sure there are difficult discussions between Ministers of the same party.
Dan Butler was a special adviser through the whole of Mark Drakeford;s five years as First Minister. He agrees that though it could be high-maintenance, with dialogue a great deal was agreed and implemented through the Labour / Plaid co-operation agreement
[Dan Butler]
The experience of the big bills we did on things like air quality and agriculture, where actually, you know, with a lot of hammering stuff out, we actually managed to get quite a lot of consensus around those things. And I think some of that was because there is some consensus, but actually some of it was because they were willing to give ground to see things done. And, you know, almost acting in the national interest you would say, rather than their party interest, and there's more than that that goes on.
But everyone agrees that the one area where the relationship was particularly difficult was on farming. Lesley Griffiths was the Minister in charge
[LG]
It was really tough, the Cooperation Agreement particularly. Obviously you've heard in the chamber this afternoon, Plaid Cymru have very different views about agriculture at times than we do. But I was very fortunate to work with a Plaid Cymru member who I got on with very well [Cefin Campbell, Plaid Designated Member], who I think was very straightforward and had a huge amount of expertise in the area.
You're not going to get everything you want in a minority government….I think I only had the two things in the Co-operation Agreement but they both caused a lot of a lot of discussions. Invariably, you would try and do it yourself as minister with the Co-operation Agreement member. But, unfortunately, it used to have to go up to the First Minister and the leader of Plaid Cymru quite often because we would come to a ‘conclusion’ - it wouldn't be a decision, it would be a conclusion which we wouldn't agree on - so you would have to go and have further discussions.
Politics is as much an art as a science. And one of the skills of an effective Minister is knowing when you are on firm ground, and when you are thin ice.
When to charge boldly forward and seize the initiative, and when to tread very carefully.
That’s true in your relations within your party, just as it is in your handling of other parties.
But how you deal with the politics will define what you can achieve as a Minister, and how long you get to stay on the Fifth Floor.
Stitching together the politics and the relationships takes a huge amount of time and emotional energy behind the scenes, but Dan Butler reflects that for all the messiness the compromises brought better outcomes
[DB]
I follow Westminster politics closely, and obviously have had a close involvement with Senedd politics. I do think the dynamics are very different because of the numbers. And I do think we get a slightly more realistic view of what politics is in Wales, because you don't just have governments that can do whatever they like. I do think that on a macro scale that it is beneficial.
In terms of the cooperation agreement, there were things in it that you know were...I think some of the stuff on nature, where Plaid had gone with a very ambitious pledge in their manifesto, you know, and we would say ‘well, that is completely contradictory to a whole load of other things that you were able to say’. But actually being able to work on them with some of those things. Things. I do think we would have had to have done it anyway.
I do think as a country, we're better off for having governments that have to accommodate, not just the views of various ministers, but the views of other parties and people that come at it from completely different perspectives.
You’re listening to the Fifth Floor, a look inside the Welsh Government to reveal the pressures faced by Ministers in getting things done. My name is Lee Waters, and for 5 years I was a Minister in the Welsh Government.
I’ve been speaking with former Special Advisers, civil servants and Ministers to try and explain the inner workings of politics and government in Wales to help students get a richer understanding of how the machine works. The full set of transcripts have been published by Cardiff University and you can find the link in the notes.
I recorded these free-flowing conversations, and many of the people you’ll hear, are speaking on the record for the first time. Each episode considers a major pressure that confronts you when you step out of the lift at the top of Ty Hywel.
_____________
So here you are, a Government Minister, sitting in your office on the Fifth Floor, trying to address a problem. Let's assume you’ve successfully prioritised, got your officials on board with your preferred solution, identified money to fund your policy, and got agreement from local government to work with you on implementing it.
What have you forgotten?
[Tom Woodward]
What the party, what the backbenchers are thinking and MPs are thinking, and whether they're on board and bringing them with you, and feeling informed seems to have been absolutely huge, I think - just because of the smaller number of people in Wales. This is really important. In a way that if you've got a big, super, big majority in in Westminster, you can kind of crack on? You've got to bring people with you in Wales obviously.
Tom Woodward was a special adviser under three different First Ministers and knows only too well that in a political environment politics matters.
In a parliamentary democracy the executive relies on the consent of the legislature.
And Ministers only have an office on the Fifth Floor with the support - or at least acquiescence - of their colleagues on the 2nd and 3rd floors.
A wise Minister pays attention to the concerns of their colleagues in the Parliament.
As Lyndon Johnson famously observed, 'The first rule of politics is to be able to count'.
It is one thing for a Minister in a Government with a big parliamentary majority to be insensitive to backbench concerns. But when the arithmetic is more fragile they’d be very ill-advised to take their own side for granted
[TW]
I know the amount of times I was in a meeting and I want to do something, and I get told by someone else, well, actually, name three names - backbenchers - are not going to be happy with that. And I think ‘what the hell they bloody know about this? I've just been working on this for six months. They've just heard about it for half an hour’ [laughter]. You know, actually that initial reaction, but obviously is absolutely important. These people have to vote, and they have to back and speak publicly, saying this is the right decision. And obviously I'm saying that flippantly and as a joke. They would have known probably about the issue, but I would be told, ‘Well, go back and think again, because it's not going to fly’.
It is not easy to codify what sets the nerves of the backbenches on end.
It will depend on the public mood, what is coming up on the doorstep when they canvas, what local party members are getting exercised about in their monthly gathering, what the opinion polls are showing, whether an issue is getting the attention of opposition parties in the Senedd, if trade unions are raising concerns, or if MPs are muttering to their Senedd counterparts.
There are countless straws in the wind.
Some of it is high politics, some low. Some about genuine policy differences, some about personalities.
Is a Minister getting too big for their boots - are they ensconced on the fifth floor and not spending enough time in the tea-room, taking too long to answer letters or reply to text messages, believing their own press releases and getting a little grand.
An effective Minister is attuned to this, and will invest time in these relationships.
It can be tempting when you are on the Fifth Floor, and absorbed with matters you think are strategic and weighty, to forget the old maxim that all politics is local.
And all Senedd Members have been elected as the voice of their constituencies - and, crucially, have an equal vote. A particularly important point to remember when you are a Minister in a minority Government.
Sam Hadley worked closely with me closely with and understood the importance of the role of the Special Adviser as a link
[Sam Hadley]
There's the kind of engagement with backbenchers as well, which, you know, to be fair to you, you were always on my case about, and I think is really important. Just kind of doing your best to make sure that they feel involved, engaged, have the information that they need. And that can be quite tricky at times, because you're balancing what can seem like really big stuff - you know, the stuff you know, the stuff that you're sitting in the meetings with the minister talking about, you know, ‘do we fund this or not? How do we kind of get through the budget’, all that stuff. And then suddenly down on the micro level and dealing with, you know…
LW
..Level crossings
SH
Yeah, exactly, yeah.
Understanding where the shoe is pinching locally is critical for any Government. And whilst some Ministers can be dismissive of their backbench colleagues as irritants who should keep their mouth shut and simply obey the party whip, a wise Minister will go out of their way to nurture relationships.
A key point of difference between the Westminster Parliament and the Welsh Parliament is size.
There are 650 MPs in House of Commons, and 122 Ministers. The Senedd has 60 members and there are 12 Welsh Ministers. From 2026 that will rise to 96 Senedd Members and 14 Welsh Government Ministers.
The dynamics are completely different. In the current House of Commons there are more than 282 Government backbenchers - 223 of whom are newly elected.
Current Westminster Minsters won’t know the names of many of their colleagues, let alone have a relationship.
In the much smaller Senedd, the governing Labour Group has 30 members. An altogether more intimate relationship.
The dynamic is complex. There are inevitably a range of views and personalities. After all politics is not a quite team sport, it is competitive.
But politicians are tribal. And instinctively come together - especially when they think the tribe is in danger.
Something that is often forgotten is that politicians are human.
Nobody understands the oddities of political life better than your colleagues. It is a lonely profession, and small acts of kindness, supporting each other when life gets difficult, counts for a lot.
As does listening and engaging when you have local issues, or policy concerns.
As well as being good government, it is good politics - you’ll need all the goodwill you can get when the water gets choppy, and you need your colleagues to come to your rescue.
Here’s former Minister Lesley Griffiths
[Lesley Griffiths]
I think within my own group, I've been very fortunate to have a huge amount of support. So, you know, when I've had very tough times and I go back to health, there were a couple of issues - I had a vote of no confidence for instance: I was only ever met with support from my own group. And I think again this year we had the farmers protests and I found my own group to be incredibly supportive.
As a Minister in a devolved government you don’t just have to keep an ear to the ground in your own Parliament, you need to be mindful of the views of MPs from your own party in Westminster too.
And there are tensions
[LG]
I think it's fair to say a lot of them were anti-devolution. They might not agree to that, or admit to that, but I think, you know, scratch the surface and a lot of them were - a lot of them were very supportive. You know there may have been mutterings. I don't think really any of them ever challenged me over decisions. But, you know, I knew there was unhappiness at times.
Though MPs currently share constituency boundaries with Senedd Members, they work to a different electoral cycle and a different mandate. They are members of a Parliamentary Party dominated by the UK leadership and focused on the politics of the whole of the UK, not just one part of it.
Mick Antoniw has been a Welsh Government Minister under three different Welsh Labour Leaders, and used to sit on the UK National Executive Committee of the Labour Party
[MA]
I've been a member of the Labour Party for 52 years, and there has always been a high degree of, you know - if you have a broad church, you have a broad range of opinions and a broad range of conflicts, and the question is, ‘how do you manage them’?
And of course, we have a political system, an electoral system, which I think increasingly aggravates. It contains widely differing views and aspirations within an electoral system that in my view is certainly outdated at Westminster level.
But of course you have the historic issue with the Labour Party, which of course was a very centralist party within a single parliamentary structure within the United Kingdom, and emerged out of an imperial environment as well. And there is a lack of understanding across the Labour Party in terms of really a full understanding of what devolution is, what it actually means.
It is beginning to improve. There's a beginning to recognise the issue of decentralisation of power, mayors and so on. But of course, when you have such a large number of new people coming into Westminster who clearly have an aspiration, they just want to do things, and they see anything that might stop them being able to do that as being a hurdle, as being a sort of barrier. That then begins to create tensions in terms of the delineation of responsibilities, because decentralisation of power is in conflict with a body that still is built on the concept of overwhelming sovereignty under the Royal Prerogative in a constitutional environment where there is no proper, delineated framework.
So those are tensions that will, I imagine, grow. How they get resolved will depend on the quality of leaderships and the ability to work together and recognise mutually that.
But there's no doubt that we have a constitutional structure that is very, very flawed, that needs to be better delineated.
It’s not just your own side you need to pay attention to.
In 26 years of devolved government in Wales there has, until now, always been a Labour Government. But the party has never had a majority in the Senedd. At most it has had 30 of the 60 seats.
Enough to govern, but to rule requires the support of all your own side plus the backing of least one other in key votes. In the Welsh system - to use a software analogy - attentiveness to the Senedd is not a bug, but a feature
[MA]
I mean the Senedd is unique compared with Westminster in that it can only operate on the basis of agreement and partnership. Now, what the level of that is obviously depends on what the balance of members actually is. But on the basis that no party has ever had a majority, and it's unlikely in the foreseeable future, even with a new system, that any party will have it.
It means your starting point is always going to be, ‘who are you going to work with?’
As a Minister in a devolved government you don’t just have to keep an ear to the ground in your own Parliament, you need to be mindful of the views of MPs from your own party in Westminster too.
And there are tensions
[LG]
I think it's fair to say a lot of them were anti-devolution. They might not agree to that, or admit to that, but I think, you know, scratch the surface and a lot of them were - a lot of them were very supportive. You know there may have been mutterings. I don't think really any of them ever challenged me over decisions. But, you know, I knew there was unhappiness at times.
Though MPs currently share constituency boundaries with Senedd Members, they work to a different electoral cycle and a different mandate. They are members of a Parliamentary Party dominated by the UK leadership and focused on the politics of the whole of the UK, not just one part of it.
Mick Antoniw has been a Welsh Government Minister under three different Welsh Labour Leaders, and used to sit on the UK National Executive Committee of the Labour Party
[MA]
I've been a member of the Labour Party for 52 years, and there has always been a high degree of, you know - if you have a broad church, you have a broad range of opinions and a broad range of conflicts, and the question is, ‘how do you manage them’?
And of course, we have a political system, an electoral system, which I think increasingly aggravates. It contains widely differing views and aspirations within an electoral system that in my view is certainly outdated at Westminster level.
But of course you have the historic issue with the Labour Party, which of course was a very centralist party within a single parliamentary structure within the United Kingdom, and emerged out of an imperial environment as well. And there is a lack of understanding across the Labour Party in terms of really a full understanding of what devolution is, what it actually means.
It is beginning to improve. There's a beginning to recognise the issue of decentralisation of power, mayors and so on. But of course, when you have such a large number of new people coming into Westminster who clearly have an aspiration, they just want to do things, and they see anything that might stop them being able to do that as being a hurdle, as being a sort of barrier. That then begins to create tensions in terms of the delineation of responsibilities, because decentralisation of power is in conflict with a body that still is built on the concept of overwhelming sovereignty under the Royal Prerogative in a constitutional environment where there is no proper, delineated framework.
So those are tensions that will, I imagine, grow. How they get resolved will depend on the quality of leaderships and the ability to work together and recognise mutually that.
But there's no doubt that we have a constitutional structure that is very, very flawed, that needs to be better delineated.
It’s not just your own side you need to pay attention to.
In 26 years of devolved government in Wales there has, until now, always been a Labour Government. But the party has never had a majority in the Senedd. At most it has had 30 of the 60 seats.
Enough to govern, but to rule requires the support of all your own side plus the backing of least one other in key votes. In the Welsh system - to use a software analogy - attentiveness to the Senedd is not a bug, but a feature
[MA]
I mean the Senedd is unique compared with Westminster in that it can only operate on the basis of agreement and partnership. Now, what the level of that is obviously depends on what the balance of members actually is. But on the basis that no party has ever had a majority, and it's unlikely in the foreseeable future, even with a new system, that any party will have it.
It means your starting point is always going to be, ‘who are you going to work with?’
A year into the first Assembly Rhodri Morgan formed a full coalition with the Liberal Democrats to get stability until the end of the term, and he did it again with Plaid Cymru in 2007.
When Carwyn Jones emerged from the 2016 elections with 29 of the 60 seats for his party, he turned to the solitary Liberal Democrat, Kirsty Williams, to join the Government. In a constitutional innovation they formed not a coalition, but a ‘progressive agreement’. Kitsry Williams became a Liberal Democrat Minister in a Labour Government. And it lasted the full five years, surviving a change of First Minister and a pandemic.
Carwyn Jones did the same with the sole independent Senedd Member, ex-Plaid Cymru leader, Dafydd Elis Thomas. He brought him out of the cold and onto the fifth floor. His support came with few strings attached.
But as part of her terms of agreement Kirsty Williams insisted she had the freedom to take a different view to other Ministers when it came to issues that were not devolved to Wales. And on a weekly meeting with the First Minister to address tensions as they arose
KW
I remember when I first met with Carwyn Jones and I was trying to set out my terms. And I said, ‘and I need to see everything’. And he said, ‘believe me, you do not want to see everything’. And I was like, ‘no, no, no, no, I need to see all the papers that you see’. And he's like, ‘I'm telling you now that is just not manageable’.
But those weekly meetings were really, really important. So there would be issues coming up. Some of them were like the ‘known knowns’. So I always thought I'd have to quit because a decision would finally be made about the M4. I thought that would be the time I'd have to leave.
LW
I hadn’t realised that was a ‘walk the plank’ issue.
KW
Yes
LW
If I had I wouldn't have gone to so much trouble if I’d realised!
[Laughter]
KW
Oh, no, don't say that. So yeah, we always worked on the basis that I'd have to leave when that happened, because the party would not stand that. So there's lots of things the party,
LW
And Carwyn Jones knew that, but he was going ahead anyway?
KW
Yeah, he was going ahead anyway. But as it came to pass, that didn't happen, and I didn't have to go. But that's what we were always working to. We figured we'd have that time in the government, and then I would have to leave, because there was no way the Liberal Democrats would put up with that. So they were like ‘knowns’ like that.
And then obviously there are events that come up within the context of the Welsh Government, and you've got to try and handle that. But then there's, like, the other stuff that's going on in the world. So obviously, there were often votes around Brexit on the floor when I was the Minister. You know, it used to drive the Tories mad, in particular, where I would not vote with the government.
Because that's an arrangement that I'd come to with the FM, obviously collective responsibility applied when there were matters that the Welsh Government were responsible for, that were devolved. But if it was outside of that, and it wasn't a devolved issue, I was allowed to have the flexibility and the freedom to vote in the way I wanted to. It used to drive the Tories mad, they used to put up little memes and things on social media, but they were always a source of great hilarity to me.
The politics of cooperation are very familiar to every First Minister, but the machinery of the Welsh Government can still struggle to break out of the Westminster mold. Tom Woodward came into Government with Kirsty Williams from the Liberal Democrats as her Special Adviser
[TW]
One thing I will make as a wider point was that it took a long time for the civil service to get used to it. The Civil Service has had the same government for over 20 years. So that does blur the lines a little bit of ‘what we've achieved together’ - ‘we’, as in what the Welsh Labour government, and whatever people has joined them - and civil servants. So the lines that you've used to defend what you've done, everything is actually all as one.
And Kirsty had spent however many years criticising all sorts of policies. You know a basic example would be, correspondence goes out, or doesn't go out, but would come up to her and it says, you know, ‘we're extremely proud that we have did blah blah blah in 2010’. and she's like, ‘I criticised that. In fact, I said we should scrap it’.
That was an interesting case study. You know most civil servants in Westminster, they're used to government's changing. And you just change with that. It'd be fascinating to know if there was completely a different party in Wales, how the civil service would move, because it's not done it before, and it's defended the same record.
But veteran civil servant John Howells has a different take. In his experience officials take the various permutations thrown up by Senedd arithmetic in their stride
[JH]
I think over time I developed the view that it was part of the deal if you were a civil servant supporting the government in Wales. History shows that there haven't been that many periods of absolute majority for one party, coalitions - or things that look a bit like coalitions - are therefore part and parcel of the way we do business. So it's a responsibility of the civil service to to support the delivery of government across what can be tricky political divides.
I was Director of Culture, responsible for the Welsh language legislation brought forward during the Labour / Plaid One Wales Government, when a Plaid Culture Minister, Alan Fred Jones, was responsible for legislation in relation to the Welsh language within a government, which had a Labour First Minister and a Plaid Deputy First Minister. That government had established a way of working which enabled difficult bits of business to be cleared at a political level before being put into the government machine.
I had to accept that one of my responsibilities was to manage the politics of whatever particular aspect of the legislation might be under consideration, but it didn't seem to me to be completely at odds with the way I was used to doing business, reporting to a minister from a previous government that was in the same party as the First Minister, because there were well established rules for dealing with the politics.
At the 2021 elections Labour equalled its high watermark winning 30 of the 60 seats, but First Minister Mark Drakeford didn’t want to put himself at the mercy of the fickle forces of parliamentary moods and struck an agreement with Plaid Cymru. Another constitutional novelty, just short a coalition: a Co-operation agreement based on an agreed programme of reform.
And in exchange for the smaller party supporting Labour in key votes, Plaid Cymru had two of its politicians given a place within the government as ‘designated members’, granted a small team of their own special advisers and a civil service support unit, to jointly work on delivering the agreed policy agenda - but with the ability to operate as a normal opposition on any matters not covered by the deal
Dafydd Trystan was one of the Plaid Cymru special advisers
[DT]
I think by and large, it was relatively easy, because Ministers on both sides - the Ministers and the two ‘Designated Members’, for the most part, had shared principles when coming to tackle an issue. So on the Plaid side, Cefin Campbell and Sian Gwenllian were there, and then Jane Hutt amd Mark Drakeford were key in shaping the cooperation agreement on the Labour side, but then also a large number of Ministers worked with the Plaid ‘Designated Members’ to make things work.
I think on the whole, it worked well, if not very well. And this is just a personal reflection from the inside if you like. There's an interesting one which I kind of reflect on that at times, the Ministers who had the strongest ideas were at times, the more difficult to work with, if you like. And that's not a criticism. But if you had a Minister who had a very clear idea of what they wanted to do, which wasn't necessarily aligned with what was in the Cooperation Agreement, then negotiating that was somewhat more difficult than a Minister who agreed in principle was quite happy for the cooperation agreement detail to be worked on by civil servants and a team of Special Advisers, and more or less, as long as that process had been gone through, they'd sign off what would come from it. Whereas some Ministers had far clearer ideas of exactly what they wanted to do, and it didn't involve this.
So I think for the most part, it worked very well, but a lot of that comes down to a shared set of principles and policies where you could argue about a particular part of the program, or a particular line, or a particular subset of the policy proposal, but overall, there was a confluence of principles and policies that meant it worked pretty well. And I don't know if you've spoken to Ministers or special advisors from the Labour side about the cooperation, but I'd hope they'd say something pretty similar about the progress made. I mean, there were difficult discussions at times, but hell I'm sure there are difficult discussions between Ministers of the same party.
Dan Butler was a special adviser through the whole of Mark Drakeford;s five years as First Minister. He agrees that though it could be high-maintenance, with dialogue a great deal was agreed and implemented through the Labour / Plaid co-operation agreement
[Dan Butler]
The experience of the big bills we did on things like air quality and agriculture, where actually, you know, with a lot of hammering stuff out, we actually managed to get quite a lot of consensus around those things. And I think some of that was because there is some consensus, but actually some of it was because they were willing to give ground to see things done. And, you know, almost acting in the national interest you would say, rather than their party interest, and there's more than that that goes on.
But everyone agrees that the one area where the relationship was particularly difficult was on farming. Lesley Griffiths was the Minister in charge
[LG]
It was really tough, the Cooperation Agreement particularly. Obviously you've heard in the chamber this afternoon, Plaid Cymru have very different views about agriculture at times than we do. But I was very fortunate to work with a Plaid Cymru member who I got on with very well [Cefin Campbell, Plaid Designated Member], who I think was very straightforward and had a huge amount of expertise in the area.
You're not going to get everything you want in a minority government….I think I only had the two things in the Co-operation Agreement but they both caused a lot of a lot of discussions. Invariably, you would try and do it yourself as minister with the Co-operation Agreement member. But, unfortunately, it used to have to go up to the First Minister and the leader of Plaid Cymru quite often because we would come to a ‘conclusion’ - it wouldn't be a decision, it would be a conclusion which we wouldn't agree on - so you would have to go and have further discussions.
Politics is as much an art as a science. And one of the skills of an effective Minister is knowing when you are on firm ground, and when you are thin ice.
When to charge boldly forward and seize the initiative, and when to tread very carefully.
That’s true in your relations within your party, just as it is in your handling of other parties.
But how you deal with the politics will define what you can achieve as a Minister, and how long you get to stay on the Fifth Floor.
Stitching together the politics and the relationships takes a huge amount of time and emotional energy behind the scenes, but Dan Butler reflects that for all the messiness the compromises brought better outcomes
[DB]
I follow Westminster politics closely, and obviously have had a close involvement with Senedd politics. I do think the dynamics are very different because of the numbers. And I do think we get a slightly more realistic view of what politics is in Wales, because you don't just have governments that can do whatever they like. I do think that on a macro scale that it is beneficial.
In terms of the cooperation agreement, there were things in it that you know were...I think some of the stuff on nature, where Plaid had gone with a very ambitious pledge in their manifesto, you know, and we would say ‘well, that is completely contradictory to a whole load of other things that you were able to say’. But actually being able to work on them with some of those things. Things. I do think we would have had to have done it anyway.
I do think as a country, we're better off for having governments that have to accommodate, not just the views of various ministers, but the views of other parties and people that come at it from completely different perspectives.
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