- What a HUWGE mistake it was! - 21st February 2025
- Rise and fall and rise again… - 21st February 2025
- Baby monitor - 20th February 2025
During 23 years with the BBC, and a 41 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), reporting the rise, fall and sometimes rise again, of important individuals has always played a major role for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, and this is underlined by news now of how one important person was OUT, but is apparently today back IN with the authorities…
It’s always fascinating to watch.
One minute someone is flavour of the month, the next he or she is persona non-grata (to mix my metaphors!).
It is even more incredible when that same person then becomes GRATA as happens sometimes!
Let’s look at the case, for example, of one talented politician – Ron Davies, who rose to giddy heights in politics, then was firmly in the ‘non-grata’ category, and has only partially moved out of it, although others today are doing so fully.
Ron was a UK cabinet minister (as Secretary of State for Wales), and successfully spearheaded the Welsh pro-devolution campaign in 1997.
The referendum was won with the narrowest of margins – 50.3 per cent to 49.7 per cent, and a senior Welsh politician told me the night after the vote: “NO ONE else could have done it”.
He was in an opposition party too, so this was high praise indeed!
As a journalist I watched what happened next avidly, and our paths crossed many times in the years that followed, including being rung at home by Ron.
One of our meetings included being briefed by him in his London office when Ron was Welsh Secretary, after I had interviewed him on another matter, during my years presenting the now-defunct BBC Cymru Wales TV current affairs programme, Week In, Week Out.
On other occasions he was a regular panelist on a weekly debate programme I hosted on BBC Cymru Radio Wales (RW) called The People’s Assembly.
He was a fine contributor and always answered the questions well, however first Ron was the ‘architect of devolution’ in Wales, but then in the media, he was the ‘architect of his own destruction’.
In October 1998 journalists were summoned to Downing Street and told that Ron had resigned as Welsh Secretary after admitting to the Prime Minister “a serious lapse of judgment” on Clapham Common the previous evening, but denied any sexual element.
Ron claimed he had been robbed by a Rastafarian man, whom he had just met but was about to dine with, in the presence of others. His car, telephone, wallet and House of Commons (HoC) pass were stolen, and six people were arrested. Ron went on television to apologise for his “moment of madness”, while on his hand was scrawled the word “sorry”.
But it continued. The Sun reported that Ron had engaged in a sex act in daylight with a stranger at Tog Hill in 2003. This is a picnic area eight miles North of Bath in Somerset, and it was only 17 days after his third wife had given birth to their first child. The newspaper had received a tip-off and sent a photographer.
The published pictures showed Ron leaving the bushes, but they claimed unpublished pictures captured the act.
He told the Sun: “These allegations are completely false and without substance.” Ron said to other journalists: “I have actually been there when I have been watching badgers”.
Yet he told the HoC, cryptically: “We are what we are. We are all different, the product of both our genes and our experiences.”
In June 1999, Ron had disclosed he was bisexual and said he was having psychiatric treatment to curb a “compulsive” quest for risk. In the 2008 local elections he was elected to Caerphilly council, as an independent councillor, so you could say he has partially bounced back because he is still in politics.
He has, though, never been far from the news for the wrong reasons. In September 2016, footage emerged apparently showing him placing (or as he said, clearing) rocks and logs on Caerphilly mountain, after a row over how bikers were using the area.
Let’s look a bit further afield for this ‘rise and fall’ and sometimes ‘rise again’ phenomenon.
For example China’s Communist Party has a history of purging then welcoming back senior officials. Deng Xiaoping was purged three times before leading the country out of Maoism in the late 1970s.
Some cadres are welcomed back years after their death. Jack Ma, Alibaba’s founder, received the modern version of a purge in 2020. The initial public offering (IPO) of his fintech company, Ant Group, was cancelled, with Alibaba probed and handed a record fine.
Mr Ma withdrew from public life, however now it seems he is back in with Chinese authorities.
On February 17 Mr Ma and a handful of other entrepreneurs met at a symposium in Beijing with Xi Jinping.
So the moral appears to be that you might not be OUT forever…
The memories of Phil’s, astonishing award-winning career in journalism (as he watched while some influential figures fell IN, OUT and back IN to favour) while he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition, Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order the book now!
