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As the dust settles following the UK General Election (GE) political commentators are turning to the political leaders’ past controversies, and what clue they may hold for future actions.
Senior politicians have been faced by difficult headlines during and before the campaign, which are now being re-examined, so they may be accused of having shot themselves in the foot.
Conservative leader and former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has confronted a number of them, which may have affected the final result.
For example Mr Sunak apparently defended his government’s actions during the Covid-19 pandemic (he apologised to the families of people who had died), but they have been widely viewed as wholly inadequate or worse.
Last December he told an inquiry into what happened that he was “deeply sorry” about the lives lost, but also at several points defended Boris Johnson as Prime Minister at the time, saying he met his former boss even more than his wife Akshata Murty (who has herself been at the centre of a storm of controversy), during the height of the first lockdown.
He gave up on plans to put a tough smoking ban on the statute books, but this was to have been a key part of his political legacy, although it was only voted through initially by MPs because it had the support of the opposition Labour party.
Members of his own cabinet – mostly those considered to be eyeing up his job – voted against the legislation, and his two predecessors publicly ridiculed him.
Mr Johnson told a Canadian audience: “The party of Winston Churchill wants to ban (cigars)? Donnez-moi un break, as they say in Quebec. It’s just mad”.
Mr Sunak finally abandoned this “legacy” policy amid a backlash from the tobacco industry in the form of legal threats and fierce lobbying.
In Wales his campaigning was inept in the extreme.
On one trip he asked voters if they were going to watch the Euro football tournament, even though Wales had not actually qualified.
Sir Keir Starmer has been little better in the past, and as he is now Prime Minister previous issues could have an enormous impact.
Some Labour insiders have reservations about his approach of ‘careful triangulation’ and possessing a background as a former head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), with one declaring: “If your record involves as many controversies as Keir Starmer, it’s probably not great political strategy to draw attention to it”.
Apart from his one-time role in charge of the CPS, there have been a number of controversies, including one dubbed ‘beergate’.
This was a headline-grabbing incident concerning allegations that an event in Durham on April 30 2021, attended by him, as well as his deputy Angela Rayner, could have been in breach of lockdown restrictions, and the following day, The Sun published a story along with pictures from a video showing Sir Keir with a beer while others ate a takeaway.
Labour as well as Sir Keir himself insisted at the time and since, that the event fully complied with the rules for work gatherings, with a pause for food (and he was cleared by a police investigation), nevertheless problematic stories about it dogged him for weeks afterwards.
With Welsh Labour leader and one-time First Minister of Wales (FMW) Vaughan Gething, it is difficult to know where to start.
He was still hanging on to his job even after losing an extraordinary no-confidence vote in the Senedd/Welsh Parliament (S/WP), which would have destroyed most people.
Mr Gething has said he regrets the “impact”of his decision to take £200,000 from a company owned by a man convicted of illegally dumping waste, but at the same time appeared to blame the way this controversy has been reported by the media.
There have been months of rows over the donations to Mr Gething’s leadership campaign from the firm owned by someone who has previously been convicted of environmental offences.
The company in question is owned by David John Neal, who was given suspended sentences in 2013 for the illegal dumping of waste, and in 2017 for not cleaning it up.
It has emerged during a recent leadership contest that Mr Gething had lobbied on behalf of one of Mr Neal’s companies, before his first run in 2018.
In a separate row, Mr Gething found himself having to defend a message he sent during the pandemic, where the then-health minister told colleagues he was deleting texts from a ministerial group chat.
He later sacked Hannah Blythyn, alleging she was the source of the leak to Nation.Cymru (which, perhaps ironically in the circumstances, is partly funded by the Welsh Government [WG]).
Opposition parties demanded evidence, which Mr Gething has declined to provide.
Two MSs were ‘off sick’ during the no-confidence vote, and this would not have been unhelpful to his opponents.
They were Ms Blythyn herself, and Lee Waters, the former transport minister who had previously called for the donations at the centre of the main scandal to be returned.
There is now a return to previous scandals for all politicians, and you are likely to see it happen all the time now the GE is over…
The memories of our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry’s remarkable decades-long award-winning career in journalism (including details of major political scandals) as he was gripped by the rare disabling neurological condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order the book now!
Regrettably publication of another book, however, was refused, because it was to have included names of living people.
Tomorrow – more evidence is emerging that as property prices recover, the cost of beach huts too are hitting new extraordinary levels, and this issue particularly affects Wales.
