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Crisis, what crisis? Rhodri believes the Assembly is stronger for its early, testing years

WHAT doesn’t kill you makes you trusted, at least as far as Rhodri Morgan is concerned.

The First Minister and Cardiff West AM, who will bid farewell to high office on Tuesday, pinpoints an early crisis that he believes proved to be the turning point for the nascent Assembly in the eyes of people in Wales – and for those who led its government.

The country had experienced the fuel protests, when lorry drivers and farmers blockaded oil facilities in 2000; job losses at Corus, which ended steel making at its Llanwern site in 2001 with 1,300 job losses; flooding; and a rail network in chaos following the Hatfield rail disaster. And then came foot-and-mouth.

As the Welsh countryside became ringed with gruesome, gigantic pyres, and our TVs were crowded with images of slaughtered carcasses bulldozed into the fire, their rigor mortis limbs silhouetted black against the flames, Rhodri (and it is always Rhodri – he is one of the few leaders in the Western world to be referred to more affectionately by his first name) found himself in a meeting room – an “ops room”, as he calls it – surrounded by soldiers, police, government vets, a whole phalanx of Whitehall-directed individuals.

“And they were all looking to us. They were asking ‘What shall we do?’ and they were working for us. We were de facto in charge of the crisis. We were proving that people could turn to the Assembly to solve problems. I started thinking then that this crisis – terrible though it was for so many people – helped to establish the credibility of the Assembly.”

Perhaps the Assembly had become well practised by that point. After all, along with those external crises, devolution had also proved quite capable of creating difficulties of its own.

“We’d had some dreadfully unstable birth pangs. There had been the narrow referendum vote and we’d had the farce of Ron Davies and Clapham Common. There had been huge internal wrangles over the leadership battle between myself and Alun Michael, and then all that trouble with the vote of no confidence in Alun following the row over Objective One funding.

“When we were in a minority government, we could have been thrown out at any time. I was counting the days. It got to four days and they (the opposition parties) hadn’t tabled a motion. Got to two weeks, then a month, I got my first pay cheque. I was thinking: ‘They still hadn’t got rid of me’.

“Around about that time, HTV screened a political drama called In The Company of Strangers, centred around a political adviser found drowned in the Bay. It featured a semi-mysterious female First Secretary. The people in it were highly coloured. But what was happening in the real world at the time was even more highly coloured. If anyone had presented the first two years of the Assembly to HTV as a drama to be commissioned, they would have been chucked out. Truth was stranger than fiction.”

The move to a sort of calm governance marked the end not only of the Assembly and devolution’s rocky inception, but also of years of personal political acrimony for Rhodri. All set for a berth as a minister in the Welsh Office, having previously performed the role in opposition, he found himself out in the cold the morning after Tony Blair took power in 1997. When devolution gave him other options, Rhodri decided to run against Labour’s preferred choice.

“It was all a very strange affair,” he says. “In some ways it was gratifying that Tony Blair said his greatest regret was not supporting me as First Minister. What happened in 1997 affected Julie (Morgan, Rhodri’s wife and MP for Cardiff North) terribly. I think it sometimes affects the wife worse than the husband.

“I’ve been trying to avoid this whole legacy thing. I hate looking back, but it’s hard when you’re faced with turning 70 (Rhodri marked this milestone at the end of September). I’ve been trying to work out what made me recover from my shock. I think it is that I have oodles of self belief but no ambition. I should have been shell shocked when Tony Blair refused to put me in the Welsh Office. I should have been asking – what was it that turned him against me?

“But because I didn’t have any ambition, he didn’t take something away from me. I was also a two-times loser, to Ron Davies and to Alun Michael. I haven’t lost a lot of sleep over it.”

But it wasn’t all blue skies after the Assembly put the Foot-and-Mouth crisis behind it. “My worst time in office, my absolute low, came with the 60^th anniversary of the D Day landings in 2004, when I was monstered by the press. It all started when a Scottish journalist asked (the then Scottish First Minister) Jack McConnell if he was going. It soon got down here and a huge row blew up. I was never meant to go. Edwina (Hart, the Health Minister) has a long association with the military through her family. I don’t. So it seemed more natural to me that she went.”

But mud seems to have a hard time sticking to Rhodri. That could be because no matter who you speak to in Wales, including Alun Michael and Ieuan Wyn Jones, people hardly ever have unkind words to say about the First Minister. He, however, appears to have little time for any personality cult, and also waves away any suggestion that it is down to him that the party have held sway for so long.

“We’re in completely new territory here in Wales. We’ve never been in power this long, at the Assembly for 10½ years, and 12½ in London. But we’ve never been power for more than six-and-a-half years, even when Labour was considered to be the default option here in Wales. I understand where people are coming from when they say we’ve become complacent because, after 13 years, the default option is being challenged. I remember ringing up Helen Clark (New Zealand’s Labour prime minister from 1999 to 2008) to commiserate after she lost the general election there and she said ‘People just got tired of us’. It’s something we have to watch, I think.”

Nevertheless, he will admit to developing a particular style of government that he has tailored to the Welsh people. “What I was determined to do once I had the great privilege of becoming First Minister was to say to myself: ‘Now you’ve got it. The next question is – how do you play it?’ The only way was not to give out any airs and graces, because people in Wales are totally non-deferential. They don’t like their elders and betters.

“I had a discussion about leadership with Jordi Pujol (the first president of Generalitat of Catalonia, its devolved administration, which Pujol headed for 23 years). He said to me: ‘You’ve got to get a big helicopter. You’ve got to pretend you’re powerful but you’re not from Madrid. You have to go somewhere, get in, get out – let them see you in your helicopter. It might work for you’. I said that if I tried that in Wales, people would shoot the helicopter down. I have always thought that it’s better to bring power closer to the people.”

Would bringing power to people be Rhodri’s greatest legacy? Would he like it to be? “I don’t like the legacy line of thinking on this. The first decade of devolution was about establishing an Assembly and proving to people that we can run it without making a horrendous muck-up of things.

“I see it as building a house, layer by layer. Once one layer is established, we can move on to the next. What will hurt with a No campaign? One, that the Assembly is just jobs for the boys; and two, Wales as a country is incapable of running its own affairs – think of the cost of running the economy, think of the cost of society.

“But a Yes campaign can say that we’ve run our own affairs scandal-free and there hasn’t been any almighty cock-ups here in Wales. We were told that we’d be incapable of running north, south, east and west together, that there would be issues with the language. All these problems we have overcome.

“It has to be about whether people think that we in Wales can make the right decisions, and can we make decision here better than they would be made in London. What is at the heart of the issue is the Welsh capacity to make decisions.”

However, as Wales prepares itself for a new referendum campaign, Rhodri says the achievement of which he is most proud is the introduction of the Foundation Phase for three to seven-year-olds.

“I feel a personal attachment to it. Back in 1998 (during the first ever Welsh Labour leadership race), Ron and I were due to meet in an HTV hustings. The day before, I was in the process of drawing up ideas with Kev (Kevin Brennan, now the Cardiff West MP) and we fixed on changing the curriculum with learning through play. I went on the programme, it got a very good response, and I lost the election.

“However, some years later, when they were drawing up the manifesto, I got a call from Peter Hain who asked if I had things to put in it. I said: ‘That’s very nice. How long have I got?’, thinking it would be weeks and he said: ‘You’ve got one hour’. Now we’re currently running the pilot curriculum and by 2011 all four nursery years will be doing it. I think people underestimate what a big achievement it is for a small country to do something completely different to the rest of the UK.”

By then, Rhodri will have retired from politics. As yet, he has no plans for continuing in public life. But he has given some consideration to how he’ll fill his time.

“I need to try to pick up some hobbies. I think I will do a lot of wood carving. I’d like to make garden furniture. During the Thatcher years, I enrolled in a woodcarving class at St Cyres (in Penarth). I stopped going after I was selected as a candidate in 1985. I thought I’d chat about the Zola Budd phenomenon, because it was around that time. But all three quarters of them wanted to do was talk politics.

“I’d also like to learn to play music – guitar or piano, I haven’t made my mind up yet. I’ll also do more running. I’ve thought about a half marathon.

“I think I’ll also try and write a book on the first 10 years of devolution. I don’t think it will be a best seller, but I feel a sense of obligation about it. I think that after all this time of being paid around 70% of Tony Blair’s salary, it’s the very least I can do.”