Vaughan Gething’s brief, four-month-long tenure as Wales’s first minister came to an ignominious end on Tuesday morning after four members of the Welsh government resigned their posts, making it clear that they were no longer willing to serve under him. That the four had little option but to adopt what we must now call the Boris Johnson gambit was confirmed by his subsequent resignation statement in which Gething was characteristically defiant and unapologetic.
Given that no rules had been broken – as with Johnson, also Gething’s mantra – there could be no reasonable objection to his decision to fund his successful leadership campaign through a large donation from a company owned by a businessman who had previously been convicted of environmental crimes. Any suggestion to the contrary was politically motivated and thoroughly mendacious. Absent was even a hint of remorse about his own behaviour, let alone any pretence that he was leaving of his own volition. It was a statement that served only to confirm that it was Gething’s obduracy and, yes, hubris that was the ultimate cause of his downfall.
