Rhodri

A Political Life in Wales and Westminster

Rhodri Morgan

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786831491
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Biografías políticas

Rhodri: A Political Life in Wales and Westminster is the political autobiography of Rhodri Morgan. This posthumously published account of the political life of the father of Welsh devolution is delivered with the fluency and wit that was so characteristic of the man himself. The first First Minister of Wales and Welsh Labour leader revisits the early influences that shaped him politically and which led him to Westminster, and his relationship with the New Labour project and the party establishment's campaign to prevent him becoming Labour leader in Wales – before 'the people's choice' eventually prevailed. As First Minister of Wales from 2000, he led three terms of Labour Government in Cardiff Bay (with the political, as well as health, challenges of two coalition arrangements), and navigated his own path into clear red water to present a distinct alternative policy agenda to the New Labour Government in London. Written with his typical lack of ostentation, this book allows us to read the final reflections by Rhodri Morgan on political life in Wales, in Westminster and beyond, with unique insight into the first ten years in the history of the National Assembly of Wales.

seven

Earning Respect

2000–2003

SETTLING IN AS FIRST MINISTER involved a lot of almost domestic duties. I quickly got to know my private office, and they got to know my habits – that meant my constant need for coffee to get going, especially in the morning. But more important than the coffee was my computer illiteracy. Everything would have to be in paper form – the office had just got used to Alun Michael being a computer whizz and, though I wasn’t exactly a computer Luddite, I was far from mastering the technology.

Les, my driver, a key member of the First Minister’s team had driven for Alun, and for Ron Davies before him. For years after giving up being a Cardiff taxi driver, Les had driven for the late Wyn Roberts (MP for Conwy, then Baron Roberts of Conwy), the longest serving Minister in the Thatcher and John Major era. I explained to Les that I worked pretty long hours, but I was not a world-class workaholic like Alun. I wanted to be in the office by nine in the morning, not eight, and I explained that I had no problem doing a big box of letters and reading material, but nobody should expect emails from me at two in the morning!

One thing I did have in common with Alun was that I was a stickler for good flowing grammatical English in the letters going out in my name, with bureaucratic stiffness avoided. Whereas Alun had seen every letter before it went out from any Minister, I told them to discontinue that practice – I was going to trust the Minsters to tweak their own letters. My private office could pass it on to all the other private offices the message about sounding less bureaucratic, but sticking to proper grammar.

The only letters going out from other Ministers that I wanted to see were the ones with wider policy implications, and it was up to my private office to work out the best way of being aware of what was a standard ministerial letter and one that had wider implications. I was definitely not reading all those letters – that was a definite no-no!

Everybody seemed happy with these changes and Les, the driver, did confide that my style of working was going to be good for his health. Not only had he picked my predecessor up at 7:40 am every day, to chauffeur him in from Penarth to the Bay, but Les had then routinely been kept waiting in the drivers’ room until nine in the evening. Alun would very often call him mid-evening to ask him to nip over for two of Harry Ramsden’s best – one fish and chip portion was for Alun, and one for Les. One of the consequences was that Les thought he’d put on three stone since this habit set in.

I asked if we could freshen up the First Secretary’s room – I was going to spend a lot of time in there, and it bore the heavy imprint of Alun’s home background. In other words, all the paintings on the walls were by Kyffin Williams. One Kyffin was enough – six was too depressing. I wanted a bit more variety, and I got a selection of portraits and industrial landscapes to offset the one Kyffin.

What officialdom wanted from me, in the meantime, was a public address, a speech to the masses of civil servants whose morale had collapsed and pride of working for the shiny new institution of the Welsh Assembly was at a low ebb. Most of the civil servants wished they were back working at the old Welsh Office. Permanent Secretary Sir Jon Shortridge was very keen that I address a mass meeting of as many of them as could safely be gathered together in the public foyer and stairwell at Cathays Park.

So my address was timed for two o’clock on my first Thursday in office. At about half past one, I developed a splitting headache and I felt totally stressed out – I had never expected anything like this. There were stress hormones coursing around my brain and body. I told Anna and Rose, my two Private Secretaries, that the speech to the assembled thousands of civil servants would have to be called off. ‘If looks could kill’ – they might have been looking through me – and I risked letting everybody down. They told me that civil servants from the out-stations were already on their way to Cathays Park to hear my speech, so it was next to impossible to call the whole thing off. I got the message – splitting headache or no, I had to go through with it.

‘Okay’, I said, ‘can you get me two aspirins and a cup of tea?’ They duly supplied them and I gulped down the aspirins with the tea, stole a ten-minute power nap on the office settee, and thank goodness for that settee. I slept like a baby. The headache disappeared. Les drove me up to Cathays Park and it was an amazing sight to see more than fifteen hundred civil servants filling the entire foyer and all around the first floor.

Bull by the horns as ever, I tried to grapple straight away with the low morale issue. I essayed a joke about it. I told them I knew, as things stood, that nobody wanted to boast about working for the Welsh Assembly. If your mother was chatting to her neighbour and she asked her what you, the son or daughter, was doing now, your mother would probably say something like, ‘Oh, he’s a piano-player in a brothel!’

They all seemed to enjoy or at least understand the joke, and I fell back on the fact that coming from a similar background I was also ‘one of them’. Some of the older ones might actually remember me from my time as a civil servant thirty years previously, and I saw a handful of the greyer heads nodding. What I was really trying to get across was that I was going to lead them, I was going to try to establish the authority of the government and make it respected and loved by the people of Wales. Most importantly, I didn’t want the gap, the dreaded three-mile-wide gap between us Ministers in the Bay and officials in Cathays Park, to cause problems. We were going to provide scandal-free effective government for Wales, which would transform the way the public thought of devolution. That mass assembling of Assembly civil servants, I’m glad to say, now still continues, at the beginning of each Assembly term – although, mercifully, the piano-player in the brothel joke is now redundant. I don’t know if this mass meeting with the civil service has been tried in Edinburgh or in Stormont, but it is now a Welsh fixture.

Becoming First Secretary struck home in many ways in those initial days and weeks. I realised that I wasn’t going to have the time to continue jogging three or four times a week. Jogging had been a part of my life for almost half a century, and apart from when Julie and I had three very young children very close together, with all the sleep deprivation that followed, I had always run or jogged. It was part of me. I was sixty when I took up the reins of government, and I was certainly slowing down. My joints were achier than ever before, and I simply didn’t think I would have the time to run any more. Looking back, that was probably a big mistake.

If I wasn’t going to be jogging any more, I would need to be more disciplined about walking the dog. Well, I took my dog for our first walk along the lanes around Michaelston-le-Pit on the Tuesday night after being voted in as First Secretary. I had lived on the edge of the hamlet for sixteen years. Even by the year 2000, the agricultural character of the village was being watered down and replaced by a more suburban feel – the cowmen and farmhands who had been the backbone of the place for aeons had now retired. There were no young farm-hands around.

A curious but very revealing thing happened on that walk, which was the first I had taken as head of the Government of Wales. One of the retired cowmen was also out walking his dog – I’d seen him around the lanes for years, hundreds of times, with and without our dogs, and we’d always exchanged pleasantries. This time he said ‘Noswaith dda’ to me, which is ‘Good evening’ in Welsh – and you could have knocked me down with a feather. Clouded by assumptions about the Anglo-Norman Vale of Glamorgan, I had absolutely no idea he spoke Welsh, but he’d obviously decided that since I was now head honcho in Wales it was time to start speaking to me in Welsh! We got chatting, and it turned out that he was a native of Capel Bangor, a very Welsh-speaking village north of Aberystwyth on the road to Machynlleth. He had been transferred to Michaelston during the war under the Direction of Labour scheme, when Britain was desperate to increase the production of milk. Having always conversed together only in English up until then, we always spoke in Welsh after that until he passed away. Something relating to the Welsh identity issue had clearly clicked in his mind on the day of my election as First Secretary.

The following night, I had a previously agreed booking to speak to the Institute of Welsh Affairs at the prestigious Temple of Peace, right next-door to our Cathays Park main office complex. The Institute is Wales’s best-known think tank, where the audience would normally be just a handful of think-tank groupies and lecture tasters. Now the media and others were there in droves to check me out.

I spoke on Welsh devolution pretty fluently and without any notes for about forty-five minutes. I was pleased that the audience was rapt in attention – not so pleased in the reporting of it. That is to say, there wasn’t any. No written copy supplied in advance. No spin doctors bigging up the key points. Therefore, no coverage. Too damn difficult to pick out the bones. I just had to accept that there was a huge penalty from my style of public address without notes. I preferred eye contact with the audience to using a written text and advance spinning by a team of press officers. Anyway, my eyesight had deteriorated to the point that I couldn’t look at a text in front of me and make eye contact with the audience – I could have tried bifocals, but didn’t really want to go down that road. It seemed I would just have to accept that my speeches wouldn’t get reported, however good or bad the content.

On top of my stubbornness in not providing written texts of my speeches, there was another issue. Around the year 2000, most journalists stopped going to meetings to actually listen to politicians’ speeches – now they just sat in front of computer screens all day long. I was about twenty years too late with my idiosyncratic style of speaking without notes, but I wasn’t going to change my modus operandi. Until my Clear Red Water speech at Swansea University in November 2002, I never worked off a written script with odd bits and key phrases supplied in advance to the media by spin doctoring. Even then, I wandered off-script and never reached the much-spun Clear Red Water part of the speech! Still, the intention was there.

By the Thursday of that first week, I was getting pretty knackered. Again, there was a previously agreed booking to address the Pontrhydyfen Welsh Society – Cymdeithas Gymraeg Pontrhydyfen. Les, the driver, was keen to go because he had an old friend living in the village, and I agreed not to pull out. How glad I was that I did stick to the booking – or the ‘gig’, in popular parlance – they had gone to so much trouble to prepare for my visit.

Pontrhydyfen is eight miles north of Port Talbot, so less than an hour from Cardiff. It’s famous worldwide as the home village of Richard Burton – or Richard Jenkins, ‘Rich’ as he was always known in the village. Actually, Pontrhydyfen is also famous in Wales because it has kept a strong Welsh culture, perhaps stronger than most South Wales industrial villages, and one of the key movers and shakers in Cymdeithas Gymraeg Pontrhydyfen had written an englyn, a four-line poem in strict metre, in my honour.

After the poem had been read out and I’d made my speech, we all sat down for a traditional Welsh supper at a scrubbed long wooden table. I sat among members of Richard Burton’s family. On my way home in the car, I mused that when Tony Blair became Prime Minister three years previously, had he ever enjoyed that experience of a poem being written in his honour. As with my conversation with the retired cowman in Michaelston-le-Pit, it was the special Welsh character of Wales that struck home. Maybe there was something called Welsh identity, after all – it hadn’t emerged in the referendum on devolution but, beneath the surface, it was there.

While I was still trying to come to terms with the demands of the job, the dreaded New Building Project reared its ugly head. I needed time to think about that little conundrum, but time was in short supply. In that first fortnight of me being First Secretary, my officials wanted my written authority to issue a cheque for one million pounds as a progress payment to the Richard Rogers Partnership.

I have to admit, I was not a big fan of the Richard Rogers Senedd design. It didn’t look like the centre of devolved government to me – it looked too much like a Tesco hypermarket. On top of that, it made no allowances for the micro-climate of Cardiff Bay with its occasionally ferocious south-westerlies whipping in from Penarth Head. And, above all, it was three miles – three miles too far for my taste – from Cathays Park, the Welsh Whitehall in the civic centre, which had been practically sitting there for a century waiting for the Welsh Westminster to arrive.

I was reluctant to issue the million pound cheque because, once I did it, even though it was only a progress payment, I would then be committed to the whole Richard Rogers building as well. I didn’t know if there was any alternative available, but I just needed to pause and examine the possibilities. The civil servant in charge of the building project nearly had a fit when I told him I wasn’t going to authorise issuing the cheque – he just about told me that I couldn’t do that, it was too late to go back, and we would be in breach of our contract with our landlords, Associated British Ports (ABP) via their property subsidiary Grosvenor Waterside.

The deal that Ron Davies had agreed in 1998 was that the rent on the interim HQ Crickhowell House would be kept low provided the future Assembly committed to a new HQ building on the adjoining site. ABP would then be able to recover its loss on the low rent through the enhanced capital values of all the land surrounding the new Assembly building. We were the anchor tenant in an urban regeneration scheme, but the whole idea gave me the creeps. Ychafi! Completely undignified for a newly-created and elected devolved government to be pawns in a property play – far too banana republic for my way of thinking.

But whatever my moral and practical objections, I was perhaps too late to stop it. The officials in charge of the project insisted that if there was to be a pause, we had to forestall ABP being in a position to sue us for breach of contract. I didn’t know the chairman personally, but at least I knew his name, a Swede called Bo Lerenius. The building project team was having kittens about setting up the phone call, but I told them to relax – the Swedes were all good democrats, and they would realise they were dealing with an elected government and not with run-of-the-mill commercial property clients. Bo Lerenius would understand. I couldn’t get over the attitude of my civil servants who thought we were in hock to ABP – I told them we were a government and I was the head of it.

In the event, Bo Lerenius was as nice as pie and understood the situation perfectly. If I needed time, I could have it. We chatted about my month-long stay in Sweden in 1955 in the southern province of Skane (recently made famous worldwide by the popular Wallander series of books and television programmes).

The biggest question was whether there was any way of reactivating what had been the original Cardiff City Hall option for the Assembly. Being only three hundred yards from Cathays Park where all our officials worked, it was undoubtedly the best location, not too close and not too far. The legislature on one side of the park and the executive branch of government on the other, it was ideal, except that negotiations to buy City Hall from Cardiff City Council had completely broken down in 1998.

Even the threat that the entire Welsh Assembly set-up could go to Swansea instead of Cardiff hadn’t moved the regime at City Hall. Ron Davies tried everything, working via the District Valuer to try to set a price for the estate that gave something to the Council and to the incoming Welsh Assembly, but it was almost impossible to put a value on City Hall once the project team had decided that the Council Chamber couldn’t be used for the Assembly Chamber.

Ron had tried negotiating with Council Leader Russell Goodway, with his Permanent Secretary Rachel Lomax and the Council’s chief executive present – Ron had even tried just him and Goodway in a room together, just two Labour politicians trying to hammer out a deal. I knew that if Ron couldn’t do a deal with the Council leadership, it was even less likely that I could. My only hope was that the Council had maybe eighteen months of a cooling-off period, since the breakdown of negotiations, and I’d give them a few more months with the hint that, if there was any movement, then I was open for a deal.

One of the fundamental difficulties was that the Council Chamber was too small and unsuitable without alteration. But it was also incredibly beautiful, and Grade 1 Listed. It was full of history, couldn’t be altered, and was therefore discounted for its suitability to be the new Assembly Chamber. The public gallery was far too small for a transparent new democracy; likewise, you couldn’t fit new technology into the seating of the Council Chamber. The new Assembly was expecting to go paperless and to be as high-tech and electronic as possible, and therefore the brand new Chamber would have to be dropped in on the north side of the foyer. Then, as soon as you took out the cost of that new chamber, you would have to net the cost off the valuation that you could afford to pay for the City Hall – which left almost nothing for the City Council to build itself alternative accommodation.

On the City Council leadership side, there was very little appetite for devolution at all – a case of this town ain’t big enough for both of us. If the Assembly was there in Cardiff, it would mean another bunch of politicians taking away the oxygen of publicity from the Council leaders. So, I was caught between a rock and a hard place. There was no approach from the City Council, and I wasn’t going begging. We’d have to go back to trying to think of cheaper ways of building the new Assembly on the ABP site, and the alternative proposals on that site, including building over the car park, were very problematic.

No less problematic, as it turned out, was the Richard Rogers building itself. It didn’t function as a magnet for other office blocks to be built next-door, so ultimately I don’t think the whole anchor tenant idea worked for ABP. The entire package was eventually sold off to Aviva, the insurance and pension fund giant. I don’t think there was any urban regeneration gain in the long run for the public or private sectors, and the whole thing was a shambles, but I’d come into it too late to be able to come up with a cost-effective alternative. I had to recognise the limits of the powers of the First Secretary.

The problem with the new building only emerged when we bought the pause to an end, and told the Richard Rogers Partnership to crack on with it. The tenders for the first work packages came in spot on, as per the quantity surveyors’ predicted prices. So, they covered the groundworks. So far, so good.

A few months later, the tenders came in for the first phase of superstructure work packages for the walls, floors and the roof. But, horror of horrors, they were double and treble the quantity surveyors’ estimates, which were anyway for much bigger sums than the groundworks.

Edwina Hart and I went through everything with the project team. The explanation for the bids being so high was that the sub-contractors were including a substantial sum for designing the walls and so on, not just in the construction. All these details were meant to have been there in the design specifications supplied to the potential bidders, but evidently the contractors tendering for the work didn’t think the detailed design had been done. Should that have been the responsibility of the Richard Rogers Partnership, or of the structural engineers Ove Arup?

I had a mole inside Arup’s, a Labour activist who was also a structural engineer of high talent. He wasn’t working on the Assembly building himself, but knew everything going on in Arup’s Cardiff office.

Ove Arup is one of the most prestigious structural engineering consultancies in the world. When a construction project gets into difficulties on the design work, you normally sack the structural engineers and call in Arup’s. But what are you supposed to do when Arup’s are already your structural engineers? That’s when you could run into really serious problems.

According to my mole, the Arup team had not been able to solve the problem of all the wavy lines in the Richard Rogers design – I was told that they couldn’t find a way of fixing the walls to the roof, and the floor plates to the walls. All the sub-contractors wanted the kudos of working on a prestige project like this, but they didn’t want to go bankrupt in the process, and that was why they were putting in high bids to include an allowance for finishing the detailed design, as well as for the construction. So, against this backdrop, we felt we had to sack Richard Rogers.

We might comfort ourselves with the thought that, as bad as our new Assembly building project was going, I never felt it ran as completely out of control as the new Scottish Parliament...