Mark Drakeford has a really frustrating habit.
The First Minister is, generally, pretty popular among the Welsh public. Of course, there are those who seemingly despise him with every fibre of their being – and like to publicly make that clear – but in the main, Mr Drakeford does enjoy significant support within Cymru.
Part of this is down to a – in some respects carefully cultivated – reputation for being straight-talking, fronting up and generally rising above petty politics.
Read more: Pressure on Mark Drakeford grows over his 'not true' statement to the Senedd
Indeed, it was this very perception that served as such a boon to him during the Covid pandemic.
Set against Boris Johnson’s parties, sleaze and public-sector contracts for donors, the more measured approach taken by Drakeford – who at least seemed to have read his briefing documents – boosted his popularity and profile to a significant victory in the 2021 Senedd elections. But there is a side of the First Minister that surfaces again and again.
A side that frustrates both his direct political opponents and those who simply want better governance in Wales. This is his seeming inability to admit when he is wrong or has made a mistake.
He very rarely admits that he has misstepped – when he is caught out and it is demonstrated that he has made an error, his default setting is not to admit it.
Instead his MO is to say it is those criticising him who have failed to understand the point he is making. When he has made missteps, he has never said he has made a misstep, it is always “you have failed to understand”. Often this is accompanied by, at the very least, a patronising tone and, at worst, righteous fury at having been challenged.
There is a hubris to this.
Welsh Labour loves to point out that it is the most successful democratic party of the past century, always being the biggest party in Wales. But this continuous autopiloting into brushing away any legitimate criticism with indignation and patronising words is exactly the same entitlement and “we have a right to rule” mentality that is levelled against the Tories in England.
Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the controversy last week over Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board being taken out of special measures just before the 2021 election, only to be put back in again at the start of 2023.
To cut a long story short, Mr Drakeford said in the Senedd this year that the decision to take the beleaguered health board out of special measures was made “because we were advised that that is what we should do by the Auditor General”.
These were his exact words. He also got really, really snarky when Plaid leader Adam Price had the temerity to challenge him about it.
However, it has since emerged that the Auditor General wrote a letter to the Welsh Government at the time, insisting that he did not give this advice and neither did his staff, and calling on the First Minister to stop suggesting otherwise.
He also wrote a letter to the Welsh Government saying that comments suggesting he did give advice were “unhelpful” as it undermined his impartiality.
I am not suggesting here that Mr Drakeford deliberately misled the Senedd. He didn’t make the original decision on Betsi – that was then Health Minister Vaughan Gething. Most likely, he read his notes, they said “advice came from Auditor General”, and he said it.
Clearly the Auditor General didn’t give this advice, so it is only right and proper that the First Minister amend this mistake. But he hasn’t. Instead he has doubled down and gone into the patronising autopilot.
“I certainly have not misled the Senedd,” he told BBC Wales.
He said the process on special measures was a “complicated system for those who are not used to it”, adding: “It begins with the Auditor General, the civil service and Health Inspectorate Wales coming together to discuss whether or not an organisation needs to have any extra intervention. Separately, civil servants then advise ministers and the third step in this chain is ministers decide.”
He concluded that the inspectorate “and the Auditor General do not directly advise ministers, but the process does start with them”. He also said he would write to the Senedd’s presiding officer, “setting this process out for people so nobody needs to be confused in future”.
So we are all wrong?
The sentence “we were advised that that is what we should do by the Auditor General” is not totally at odds with the fact that the Auditor General never gave any such advice. The real problem, according to Mr Drakeford, is that other people “are confused”.
Let’s face it, the First Minister said something that clearly isn’t correct.
We can all see that. Why doesn’t he just suck it up and correct the record?
He misspoke, we all do it, so just admit it. There is hubris here and this is not the first time.
Everyone will remember the First Minister’s tirade in the Senedd last autumn at Tory leader Andrew RT Davies which involved some borderline aggressive file-flicking.
This was widely applauded as the passionate outburst of a man of principle. However, the questions that Mr Drakeford had been asked at the time were perfectly legitimate.
They were about the shamefully long ambulance waits in the Welsh NHS and serious mismanagement that the Welsh Labour Government surely must take responsibility for.
Perhaps Mr Davies wasn’t the best man to ask these questions, given that just a week before Liz Truss (whom he’d backed) had tanked the British economy, sent our mortgages through the roof and sterling through the floor, but the questions he was asking were fair and deserved real answers, not an angry “How very dare you?”
The Covid pandemic also shows examples of Drakeford’s dislike of admitting mistakes or robust scrutiny. There is no doubt that the Welsh Government made real errors in how they handled the management of Covid-19.
Yet Mr Drakeford refuses point-blank to have a Wales-specific inquiry into the pandemic. Whenever challenged about this, he simply returns to the “you cannot understand the specifics of the response without a UK context” so it has to be UK-wide.
But he has made enormous political capital out of saying he handled Covid differently from England.
The idea that the Welsh people can’t cope with two inquiries is patronising in the extreme and it is hard to argue that this is anything other than a naked scrutiny dodge.
One of the very things an inquiry would look at would be the specific decision made by the Welsh Government such as the decision to ban supermarkets from selling items they deemed “non-essential”.
This is now – and was then – regarded as a misstep in both the policy and messaging, but Mr Drakeford would again dig in his heels, saying that people had misunderstood what they were trying to do.
In the very early days of the pandemic he made another clear misstep when he said twice in a press conference: “If you as an individual are out taking exercise you can, at a social distance, have contact with one other person.”
But if you remember, at this point this was absolutely forbidden. When the First Minister was challenged about these comments later and his error pointed out, he simply labelled it “mischief”.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this stubborn trait by the FM is that he can admit an error when it is politically expedient for him to do so.
In early March this year, Labour Senedd Members, including Mr Drakeford, voted for a motion criticising the Welsh Government’s own Roads Review, which recommended the mass cancellation of upcoming roads projects.
The reason he did this was to head off a rebellion of back-benchers. So he can admit a misstep, when it is his own party pointing out the error.
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