Back to the UK Covid Inquiry and today it’s in Cardiff, where Welsh Prime Minister Mark Drakeford has given some rather, er, colourful evidence. After watching Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak and Nicola Sturgeon being grilled in previous hearings, Drakeford had some idea at least of what to expect and prepare — and he’s certainly not left the media with a shortage of sound bites.
The Welsh PM isn’t holding back. He slammed the former PM for trying to ‘minimise the seriousness’ of Covid, Hancock was described as getting ‘the most basic things wrong’ and Cummings criticised for saying ‘no’ to a mass gathering ban. Drakeford described Boris’s refusal to meet the leaders of the devolved nations — in case it gave ‘the false impression that the UK was a federal state’ — as ‘extraordinary’ and says he didn’t agree that a ‘UK-wide’ approach would have been better.
But was there was a hint of hypocrisy in Drakeford’s evidence? He criticised Johnson for not chairing Cobra meetings sooner in the pandemic, adding that it would have ‘sent a stronger signal about the seriousness with which the gathering storm was being taken’. Poole then brough up Drakeford’s own absence from the first three Cobra meetings. Awkward…
But despite his scathing remarks about many senior UK government figures, Drakeford did throw a few niceties in the direction of Michael Gove. Employing the rather unusual device of, er, football metaphors, Drakeford submitted in his written evidence that Gove was a ‘skilful lead minister’ who was ‘a centre forward without a team lined up behind him, and where the manager was largely absent’. While conversations with Gove were ‘certainly useful’, speaking to Boris would have been preferable, the Welsh PM told Tom Poole KC:
The absent manager was the prime minister because he was never at these meetings or at the table, and while Gove was a senior minister…he has influence rather than the determinative impact which a message from the prime minister would have.
Drakeford saved more complimentary words for Scotland’s former first minister Nicola Sturgeon. He tells the inquiry that he had the ‘highest regard’ for the Scottish FM and that Sturgeon was a ‘formidable politician’. ‘A lot of UK ministers were afraid of her,’ Drakeford said, though admitted himself there was ‘always anxiousness’ when dealing with Sturgeon. Her decision-making was ‘coloured’ by her ‘particular attitude about the future of Scotland’, he added. Quelle surprise.
And on the topic of a senior politician who deleted her pandemic messages, Drakeford has also run into WhatsApp-related difficulties. Though he told the hearing he’d only used WhatsApp precisely 11 times during Covid, he has been unable to recover messages exchanged between 2018 and 2021 from his official phone. This feels familiar…
Watch the clip here:
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