WalesHome.org

THE election campaign that has lasted twice as long as some General Elections is now virtually over. Opinion on the level of sustained interest in the campaign may have varied, but I think one thing that united pretty much all of us was the belief that the campaign had run its course. As previously indicated, WalesHome.org took the decision at the outset of this race, within days of the Hearth going live, that we would report all their press releases and every single bleeding video. In doing so, we’ve tried to let the candidates themselves set the agenda. For the last eight weeks we’ve been a key place – some say, the key place – of record during this leadership campaign.

If that’s made us seem slavish to Labour, it’s been a price worth paying. You should see what it’s done to our readership figures and we think we’ve added real value to the reporting of the campaign, too.

But now that it’s all over bar the counting, there’s time to reflect on the three campaigns as a whole. Individual fuller analyses of the campaigns of Huw, Carwyn and Edwina have already been published on this site and are probably worth reading too, since they provide much of the backdrop to this post.

The boundaries of manifestos were difficult for the candidates to navigate. On the one hand, the three aware what they were saying had to be radical and new. On the other, nothing can really be added to the One Wales agreement between Labour and Plaid which is due to remain in place until May 2011. Thus some of the most striking ideas and differences of opinion were around the way that Labour as a party improves its performance. These differences were the backdrop for the first public spat of the campaign. But, as Adam reflected earlier, “All three candidates have confronted the party’s ongoing decline and all three have promised root-and-branch reform of the way it campaigns and relates to the UK Party.” Yet whichever one wins will need to act clearly and decisively on this agenda, and that won’t be easy.

Despite these boundaries, it did not prevent all three candidates thinking creatively about the state of Wales and how things might be improved. First off the starting blocks was Huw Lewis, whose manifesto was ideas rich and iterative, providing a novel forum for dialogue with potential voters. It also set out key themes around co-operative models, social partnership and educational improvement which were reference points to the campaign as a whole. Being first to produce his manifesto also gave Huw an early edge, allowing his supporters to claim he was setting the agenda for the whole “battle of ideas” which he had called for. This positioning clearly worked for him and throughout the contest he is the one who has traded least on personality and experience as critical electoral factors – the latter being expertly handled in this press release. From that moment on, his comparative lack of ministerial experience ceased to be a real issue, at least on the national stage.

Edwina Hart launched her manifesto next and it couldn’t have been more different. Set out as a dialogue with the electorate, it was generally quite sharp and provocative and demonstrated that ten years in the Cabinet had not dulled the candidate’s desire for change and reform. Indeed, the section on civil service reform was one of the big ideas of this campaign which got way too little coverage, with most commentators choosing to focus instead on what she had to say about the Welsh Language. Without a doubt, one of the most refreshing things about her campaign is that she has actually said things in a discernably left-wing accent. Over the last two months she has put clear red water between herself and the existing less clear red water. No one in general can claim to not know where she stands even if on issues like nuclear power she seemed to change position between manifesto wording and supporting a new Wylfa B.

Carwyn was much slower to release his manifesto but, as is his team stresses, this was always part of the strategy. When it arrived, as I have acknowledged previously, it was so thorough and well produced that it killed at an instant any notion that his campaign did not have a grounding in policy. His education spending pledge – so good it became a constant refrain – was always a clever way of drawing attention to his formal manifesto launch. And streaming policy announcements on a thematic basis over a week was also an useful device to dispel the myth he had nothing to say.

Online vehicles also served as a way to communicate the candidate messages. Even if I felt one particular claim of web superiority was overblown, overall my take on the three campaign sites was positive and effective. Each one used them as platforms both for the manifestos and to engage with and publicise supporters. And all three made a much better job of it than anything Welsh Labour may have done before. That may not be saying much – and I agree with some assessments that there has been nothing Obamaesque apart from the Obamicons we used – but it is a bigger step forward for Labour than most online commentators give the candidates credit for.

And just to be clear, it has also been noticeable how little impact the forces outside Welsh Labour have managed to exert on this campaign. Attempts to smear candidates, no matter how they have been dressed up under the flag of free speech, have failed to make any real impact. The scoops online have also been quite feeble most of the time – and I include the day I thought I had a set of “exclusive quotes” that were nothing of the sort. Ultimately none of us on the blogosphere, WalesHome.org included, have impacted on this race significantly at all – no matter how much some would have liked to.

Because ultimately it is the Labour candidates themselves who have set the campaign tone. Because all three candidates were fighting on clear issues and platforms, the campaign was a lot less personal than many people, myself included, expected. This was certainly preferable to the experience a decade ago, where the battle to follow Ron Davies was a mixture of Le Carre novel, gangster epic and Mr Smith Goes to Washington.

Huw Lewis’ team had been expected to be a little free and easier in positioning their candidate, untramelled by the constraints of office within WAG, as a total reversal of current direction for Welsh Labour. But their positioning was a lot more sophisticated than that, and with it came the credibility which gave Huw such a solid campaign and should, ultimately, return him to Cabinet. Indeed, Huw began his campaign by issuing a clean campaign pledge which he signed and which neither of his opponents did. This was unsurprising because, of course, it would have been deemed electorally disadvantageous for either of the two others to have followed Huw’s lead in such a way.

What was surprising, though, was that during the campaign as a whole none of the major disagreements between candidates involved Huw at all. From day one it was the teams of Carwyn and Edwina that were gunning for one another. And usually it was Team Carwyn that mounted the offensive. Buried back weeks ago was the day he chose to make health a centre point of his campaign, which hardly went down well with a Health Minister who felt constrained in her response because of One Wales programme commitments.

An even more striking episode was the day public service delivery - usually the most consensual of topics – saw a war of words between the two teams. Team Carwyn was threatening to unpick the reform agenda set out by Andrew Davies, who was of course both the Finance Minister and Edwina Hart’s campaign manager. He retorted by describing Carwyn as a “semi detached member of the cabinet”. Ouch.

But this was the low point. It got no worse and ultimately all three sides in the contest must be thankful for that. It will not take long to wash down the windows of the Senedd and remove the last specs of blood. Because, compared to the last two Labour leadership contests in 1998 and 1999, this has been a walk in the park.

The Labour Party is in such a parlous electoral state that it could not deal with another bruising battle which left the combatants not speaking to each other for the best part of a decade. It needed ideas, energy, enthusiasm and respect and got all these. Which poses the question of how the party and its new leader harnesses such qualities and uses them to motivate their party onward into two sets of critical elections in 2010 and 2011.

To my mind, it is Carwyn Jones who will get that job tomorrow and who will, in just over a week’s time, become First Minister of the Welsh Assembly Government. I have said it twice before, on AM-PM last Wednesday and on The Politics Show yesterday, so I’ll put it in writing here and now. Expect me to eat the biggest humble pie you’ve ever seen if I am proved wrong.

I agree with Adam. This contest has been good for Labour and whoever emerges victorious, will inherit a Welsh Labour Party which has finally started to believe in itself again. And to take things forward the new leader needs to make room in their team to harness the considerable talents of the two other candidates who have contributed so much positive energy to this campaign.

No stitch up and no stitches – which is exactly what Welsh Labour needed.

This is the second of three posts by the Co-Editors of WalesHome.org today dealing with the Labour leadership election.