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Edwin Phillips reads an internal Plaid Cymru memo after news that their controversial Assembly Member (AM) Neil McEvoy will be censured for using an Assembly briefing room to launch the party’s Cardiff local election manifesto.
From: Internal Media Correction Department.
To: Staff Reading Misleading Press Reports.
Ignore recent media items about your esteemed Assembly Member Neil McEvoy.
Those toads in the press would of course latch on to the Standards Commissioner concluding that Mr McEvoy had breached the Code of Conduct for AMs by using Assembly resources for party political campaigning as a Cardiff councillor.
Trust them to talk about such a minor thing.
After all he said sorry didn’t he?
They are always targeting him.
It is typical that they went on about the fact he committed the breach in March while he was suspended from the Plaid group in the Assembly after a tribunal found that he had bullied a Cardiff council official in his role as a councillor.
You would have thought Mr McEvoy had had enough of the press, but he was gracious enough to have faith in them by inviting them to a “Neil McEvoy AM weekly press conference” which was held at the media briefing room in the Senedd, when he handed out copies of his manifesto for the council elections being held on May 4.
Ignore the fact that the Commissioner for Standards, Roderick Evans, said that he found the press conference “dealt with matters outside the scope of Mr McEvoy’s activities as an Assembly Member and extended to his party political activities and Plaid Cymru’s local election campaign”.
Disregard that the cross-party Standards of Conduct Committee unanimously said that “a breach has been found and that the Member should be censured under Standing Order 22.10”.
Apart from the bit where it said Mr McEvoy had admitted the breach and said he “wholeheartedly and sincerely” apologised.
Anyway, fellow Plaid Cymru Assembly Members have been critical of Mr McEvoy, and this wasn’t taken into account at all.
Bethan Jenkins used Twitter to do it and said Mr McEvoy’s behaviour over the bullying accusation should be “condemned”.
She even said that her party leadership should not let him speak at their conference.
Ms Jenkins is a former girlfriend too!
The fact that UKIP called him a ‘red blooded leader’ speaks volumes.
Our wonderful party leadership were alive to the issue about Mr McEvoy in any event, and this should be considered before any possible ‘censuring’.
The great helmswoman herself, Leanne Wood, said: “Plaid Cymru take bullying very seriously and we also take process seriously”.
So ignore the media – except when we issue press releases.
Tomorrow a Cardiff woman’s search for her birth parents after she was adopted as a baby, and who died with no known relatives, revealed in documents kept in a cardboard box.
