BBC Politics Wales
Mark Drakeford “dented people’s confidence” in the UK government during the pandemic, the Welsh secretary at the time has said.
Simon Hart said it was “exactly what you don’t want” in a national crisis, telling the BBC Walescast podcast of his “frustration” with the then Labour first minister.
Drakeford “was selecting all the things that worked and claiming them as Welsh government, and then being very public about the things that didn’t work, and saying that they were UK government”, said the ex-Conservative MP.
The Welsh government said: “All decisions by Welsh ministers related to Covid-19 were based on evidence and always made in the best interests of Wales.”
The former Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire MP has published diaries on his time in the UK cabinet, first as secretary of state for Wales under Boris Johnson and then as Rishi Sunak’s chief whip, enforcing party discipline.
In “Ungovernable: The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip” Hart makes clear his frustration at the relationship between the two governments, particularly during the Covid -19 pandemic.
He also comments on Mr Drakeford’s appearance at a Remembrance Day event, calling him a “scruffy old university lecturer with dirty shoes”.
Hart told Walescast Drakeford was a “very nice man”, but “he’d never made any secret” of the fact he was no “massive fan” of devolution.
He said he felt Drakeford helped to create a “false” impression that “nice Mr Drakeford – and he is a very nice man – had all the solutions, and nasty Mr Johnson caused all of the problems”.
“I thought that was a very lazy politicisation of a very serious situation and I thought Mark Drakeford was party to that,” said Hart.
“It wasn’t necessarily about political advantage.”
The consequence, said Hart, was messaging to the public that was not as clear as it might have been to “minimise the risk of the pandemic causing even more mayhem”.
Hart said he wrote the book to ask the question “what went wrong?” between December 2019 and July 2024, when the Conservatives went from an 80-seat majority to a general election “drubbing”.
In a separate interview with BBC Politics Wales, to be broadcast on Sunday, he said “we have to ask ourselves the question, how on earth did this happen?”
“That is a spectacular fall from grace and, unless we’re prepared to look in the mirror and say ‘ok let’s be serious about what we did well and what we did badly’, we will continue to make those mistakes.”
“I don’t think it makes particularly comfortable reading at times”, he told Walescast.
Things “went from comedy to tragedy very quickly, as I went from being patient and well-meaning to irritable and disillusioned at times, if I was honest”, he added.
He stopped short of saying the Conservative Party was “ungovernable”, characterising his account as more of a “description of politics more generally”.
“Keir Starmer suddenly found he was hitting exactly the same headwinds as we’d hit fairly early on in his tenure,” said Hart.
“Big majority, new government, all of that – yet it was still difficult.”
‘Bumps in the road’
On his time as chief whip, Hart’s book contains anonymised and shocking stories of MPs in various compromising positions – including accounts of sexual harassment and visits to brothels.
“The examples I’ve put in the book probably occur in other industries too, it’s not unique to politics,” he said.
“Perhaps the scrutiny around politics is a little bit more intense.”
To Politics Wales he said he does not think candidates, MPs and ministers are given “the proper amount of support, training, mentoring, guidance that would be absolutely standard practice in a normal workplace”.
“They were actually very good people who just hit a lot of bumps in the road.
“Had we done enough to help them avoid those kind of catastrophes?
“Not always, I don’t think we did it that well.”