Is the Western Mail’s highly-unusual over-the-top call for Nick Bourne to resign as Tory leader the final service that paper can render to eccentric right-wing Monmouth MP David Davies and his father Peter, a Newport councillor ?
The leader the next day on the paper’s own-styled “IPodGate day six” descends to hysteria as if the paper is belatedly realising that its 140-year-old campaign to save Wales for unadulterated unionism is going down the pan.
Unfortunately for Llais y Sais (the epithet we are led to bestow by former editor John Humphries in his recent Freedom Fighters, from University of Wales Press, as well as by Aled Jones in his Press, Politics and Society, same publisher), Mr Bourne can guess with ease where the campaign rises from.
The link between the Mail and the tiny Newport clique is too well known. The Tories are too much gentlemen to name the people they are referring to. But they fully realise there’s much truth in their allegations about a two-way flow of information between what’s left of Thomson House (not much) and almost the only source of Tory information which that place seemed to believe exists.
Any comments on what Mr Bourne gets up to have to be read in the light of the statement that the position he has taken of advocating a Scots-style parliament for Wales has “earned him plenty of enemies” within the Welsh party. That’s a recent comment from one of the Llais’s journalists whose words are of value – London political editor Tomos Livingstone in The Guardian (although I thought he was still with the Mule…).
The Mail decided to stick its neck out with a page-one editorial this week calling for Mr Bourne to go. Usually, of course, this space is allocated to the main news story of the day.
Were it not that the story of Mr Bourne’s expenses was also running on the BBC, one would dismiss the originating story as standard newspaper hyperbole. Indeed, precisely because is was also running on the BBC one could still dismiss it accordingly – remember the ridiculous BBC-generated furore over the totally-unscripted remarks on a light-hearted BBC programme by another Tory AM, Alun Cairns, about Italians.
But expanding the story into a page-one editorial creates the smell of the Mail - Llais y Sais of old, we must remember - doing its utmost to gain a political scalp from Cardiff Bay.
And all over a claim for £229 which the Assembly fees office was totally willing to pay. Admittedly, the claim was for an iPod – which every Western Mail reader would know is usually bought to listen to pop music. Does the Mail indeed possess nowadays any readers who listen to anything but pop music ?
But little machines like that possess other uses.
One is for the playing of what used to be called language tapes for the learning of Welsh (and other languages) to ensure good use is made of the long driving hours between Cardiff and Aberystwyth, where Mr Bourne lives. And those who listen to what happens in the Senedd will realise the surprisingly high standard in Welsh attained by more than an few AMs. Perhaps they’ve all got iPods ?
For some years, Mr Bourne has been under unremitting attack from a small Tory clique based in the South-East which is intent on killing the Assembly. Foremost among them are the Davieses, father and son.
The son’s misinterpretation of the powers of the Assembly has been so bad that the entire public house and licensing trade in Wales has good reason to curse him for his beliefs. When smoking was being banned in Wales – ahead of England – a publicans’ deputation attending the Assembly, where they had been led to believedthere was no action they could take to minimise the effects on their businesses.
Asked why they were not lobbying the Assembly committee dealing with the subsidiary legislation on the issue, the delegation’s leader said he had been advised by his local MP (the aforesaid David Davies) that there was no point as the decisions had already been taken in London. In fact, the Welsh decisions were still to be taken in Cardiff, and evidence was still to be received. But the MP who advised them believes Wales should be precisely the same as England…..
The Mail editorial reads as if it could have been written by an acolyte of that Davies clan. Which perhaps it might have been.
The leader reminds its readers that the party used to be strongly anti-Assembly. Which bring us, of course, to the kernel of the entire rumpus. If it hadn’t been an iPod (to help learn what must appear to the Mail to be a “dying language”, although you won’t find such beliefs actually reaching the printed page), it would be something else to be used to demolish the leader of the Tory party’s pro-Assembly faction.
Perhaps the paper would have gone after his second-home expenses claim, which at £12,399.44 is among the highest allowed.
It is lucky that Mike German is not a pro-Assembly Tory, of perhaps we might learn more about his £1,033 carpet. Or about Carl Sergeant’s £409.99 mattress (mind you, the Labour member for Alun and Deeside is quite a big lad).
For far too long the Mail has been an uncritical purveyor of Davies clan press releases. Tory AMs are blunt. When the Mail wants to hear what is happening in the Tory party, they know where to ring in Newport (although, more likely, the activity is often around the other way). In mainline Tory ranks, the Mail has become a laughing stock.
Of course, what a lovely story would it be were Bourne to resign because it could be insinuated he had been using public money to listen to hip-hop…
What in idiot the Assembly would seem in right-thinking Welsh minds! Just as the resignation of Rhodri Glyn Thomas as culture minister resulted purely from him carrying a lighted cigar for less than a minute into the bar of a public house – in reality, Plaid’s leaders were far more concerned that the rev gentleman might one day feature in a spread in a London Sunday newspaper.
It is interesting that the beliefs of Martin Shipton, the Mail’s styled chief reporter, are revealed in a think-piece on his Mail blog-site, and they strongly pro-Assembly and highly critical of the present untenable arrangements between Cardiff and London. But of course, from day to day most reporters write what they believe is expected of them.
In past years, the Davies clan were seen as a self-serving, self-publicity clan worthy of note on occasion. But not almost all the time, and certainly not to the near-exclusion of other Tory voices.
Perhaps these editorials can be seen as their final blast against the future.
The joke is that both the most-noted replacements for Mr Bourne – Jonathan Morgan (Cardiff North) and Darren Millar (Clwyd West) are strongly pro-devolution.
Within the Assembly, Davies clan-adherents have by now disappeared. As they are gradually disappearing in the rest of the Welsh Tory party. The world has moved on leaving, David and his friends stranded, with fewer followers each year as the party realises that the path to power demands both a pro-Wales policy and a loyalty to that policy.
Print This Post
