Vaughan Gething’s Covid failures

A man who has the honour of being his country’s first leader from an ethnic background but who comes to office with the baggage of a questionable performance running the health service during the pandemic. It could be Humza Yousaf, but equally it could now be Vaughan Gething, who was elected as Labour leader in Wales this morning and will become First Minister when Mark Drakeford steps down this week.   

It is fair to say that his elevation will not be welcomed by everyone, not least by the relatives of those who died in Welsh care homes after patients were discharged there in March 2020 without being tested for Covid. The Welsh government, on Gething’s watch, was even slower to introduce the tests than Matt Hancock was – two weeks later, indeed. If the UK government has been criticised as being slow to get on top of Covid in the early stages, the same is even more true of Gething’s department. The new Labour leader in Wales admitted to the Covid inquiry last week that he had not even read the report into Exercise Cygnus, the 2016 project to prepare Britain for a possible pandemic. Not only did he not read it, but he gave the inquiry a somewhat dubious answer when asked why he had not read it: he said it was a Public Health England document – yet it involved the devolved public health authorities, too.

Then there was the infamous occasion when Gething and his family were photographed sitting down on a bench eating chips in May 2020, and accused of flouting Covid rules. Gething’s excuse was that he hadn’t broken the rules because they allowed people to buy food from fast food outlets. He then complained to the press regular Ipso that the story – carried in the Sun – infringed his privacy. The complaint was rejected. Like Nicola Sturgeon, he no longer has the WhatsApps from the pandemic on his phone (he blames a ‘security rebuild’ of his work phone).

Labour might want to hold up Gething as its most senior holder of elected office. Yet his record from the most significant part of his political career is not impressive.