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GEORGE W Bush famously declared that he had “earned political capital” during his 2004 re-election campaign that he intended to spend in office.

He won’t welcome comparison with the former US President, but Carwyn Jones should perhaps reflect on the considerable political capital he has accrued. Unlike Bush in 2000 at least, the Bridgend AM swept the board in his electoral college, winning all three sections and obviating the need for a second round. By any measure, Welsh Labour’s new leader has built up quite a war chest. The question is now how he intends to spend it, and on what.

Both roles he now occupies – First Minister and leader of Welsh Labour – demand some expenditure. In the former, he can face both his coalition partner and the Assembly’s opposition groups as the unrivaled leader of Wales’s biggest party. This should not be underestimated; a weakened leader or one challenged from within his or her own party is a leader more prone to error or reckless gamble. Carwyn Jones faces his opponents with the full weight of his party behind him. He can look forward without having to glance over his shoulder.

But the opportunity to spend his windfall as First Minister is nonetheless narrow. Arguably, Carwyn is limited in the scope of policy innovation he can embark on this side of the next Assembly election. He is tied into the One Wales agreement and all of the commitments this contains, while the scale of the budgetary pressures facing every minister makes innovation over and above that agreement difficult. Politically, too, the spotlight – for the next few months at least – will be facing more towards the General Election than to Cardiff Bay.

The same is not true of his role as Labour leader. Not only does Carwyn enjoy a freer hand, he also faces a pressing task. The task of re-shaping Welsh Labour as a campaigning and policy-making organisation is not only urgent, it is also vital for the long-term.

The reason why it cannot wait is clear, and is less about responding to the repeated, dire and often overstated warnings of the fatal demise of the Labour brand in Wales. Instead, it is about the need for Welsh Labour to take the next steps towards becoming a genuinely post-devolution political organisation.

The leadership race was a good one. Many issues were discussed, and hundreds of party members were involved and re-energised. But the debate about what kind of party and organisation we want Welsh Labour to be never really took off. It never sparked to life in the way the party needed it to. It was a missed opportunity and not one that can be passed up again.

Despite good reasons to be sceptical about the depth of the crisis facing Labour in Wales, there is no doubt that the challenge it faces is serious and immediate. The party has gone backwards at successive elections, the base in local government has been substantially eroded and it faces genuine electoral challenges in all parts of Wales, the scale and nature of which could easily merit another and far lengthier article. These facts haven’t changed simply because Carwyn enjoyed such a comprehensive win. Mandate or not, change is needed.

But this is also about preparing for the future – and in particular a future where the Assembly has full legislative powers. If that happens, the fabric of politics in Wales will change. Welsh Labour needs to be ready for it and not overtaken by it.

What should this change be? What are the priorities to address?

Firstly it has to address a key structural problem: the boom and bust cycle of party funding. This allows investment and organisational capacity to be built up in the run-up to the UK General Election – and then allowed to run down in the years in between. This puts Welsh Labour at a huge financial disadvantage in the build up to Assembly Elections. Contrast this with Plaid’s funding drive to raise £500,000 ahead of 2011. The need for a more independent financial footing for Welsh Labour, without losing the benefits it derives from sharing the resources and expertise of the wider Labour Party should be a top priority. This must involve, although not exclusively, a commitment from trade unions to end the ad hoc funding of the party and to put in place a genuine programme of investment in a programme of party reform.

Secondly, there needs to be an urgent focus placed on 2012. The next local government elections are crucial to the long-term health of Welsh Labour. The hollowing out of the local government base cannot be allowed to go unchecked. A strategy for growth is needed. The trajectory of decline in Welsh Labour’s electoral fortunes can only be reversed with a vibrant, healthy local government constituency. 2012 must be given the status as top-tier elections that they deserve.

The prospect of primary law-making powers drives the need for the third reform. A critical review of the party’s policy making process is needed to assess whether it is capable of meeting the future challenge of greater legislative responsibility. Legislative proposals will be needed. New ideas will be essential. Right now the current partnership in Power process is ill-equipped for this challenge. A radical overhaul may be necessary. One step should be to revitalise the Ideas Wales project. It stalled, after a good start, for various reasons, but the premise remained a good one: a Labour think-tank capable of generating discussion about new ideas and linking the party into the wealth of expertise in Welsh academia.

Fourthly, the party needs a new media revolution. This will mean loosening the tendency towards risk-aversion. Yes, new media comes with risks. Candidates can speak out of turn and devolving control of the campaign medium is a big step. But the relationship between the voters and parties has radically altered and Welsh Labour has fallen behind in how it has responded to it. A modest investment and a more substantial change of culture could easily see Welsh Labour leap to the head of the pack of online campaigners.

And finally the party needs to start prioritising Young Labour and Labour Students. Not enough is being done to bring forward new, young talent. Look here at the example of Plaid Cymru. In selecting candidates like Nerys Evans and Bethan Jenkins they opted for youth and talent over time served. This wasn’t without risk, but the dividend has been a group that looks and acts a bit more like a younger, next generation Wales. There is a greater depth of young talent in Welsh Labour than in any other party. It is time we started tapping into it.

On all sorts of levels Carwyn – thankfully – is no George Bush. So perhaps a better analogy (although for some perhaps no less controversial) is Tony Blair. He understood the need for the party to change. He understood that the world and society had changed. Carwyn could be the first post-devolution, Welsh Labour moderniser.

Imagine the legacy: legislative powers secured, a reshaped, post recession economy, and Welsh Labour revived as the dominant political force in Welsh politics. Time to start spending that political capital.

JUST when you thought it was safe to go back on YouTube, another Carwyn video has been produced. Eight weeks in eight minutes.

A nicely edited reminder of recent weeks and something to watch as we wait on news of the new Cabinet (of which more later).

We promised you the remaining figures from the Labour leadership contest, and here they are.

	Edwina Hart	Carwyn Jones	Huw Lewis	% of college
ASLEF	0.1659	0.0572	0.0172	0.24026
CWU	0.8251	0.6727	0.184	1.68182
Community	0.6711	0.3708	0.1594	1.2013
GMB	1.6642	3.4346	1.0278	6.12662
Fabian Society	0.0298	0.054	0.0363	0.12013
Musicians' Union	0.0474	0.1675	0.0253	0.24026
NUM (Wales)	0.039	0.5226	0.039	0.60065
Socialist Health Association	0.0801	0.0255	0.0146	0.12013
TSSA	0.043	0.0628	0.0143	0.12013
UCATT	0.0467	0.5072	0.0467	0.60065
Unison Cymru	1.085	4.5443	0.6174	6.24675
Unite	5.4755	5.0051	1.5864	12.06703
USDAW	0.7982	1.3041	0.5405	2.64285
Welsh Council of the Co-operative Party	0.3047	0.3308	0.5658	1.2013
Welsh Labour Students	0.0318	0.0283	0.0601	0.12013
				33.33301%

How the affiliated organisations break is always an interesting sport to Labour Kremlinologists, and this time is no different. Lee has already posted on this, observing the relative shallowness of Unite Boss Andy Richards’s writ. His fulsome endorsement of Edwina resulted in her only very narrowly beating Carwyn Jones for the largest number of that union’s votes. The Bridgend AM meanwhile, comfortably carried those unions who backed him, notably Unison, while the Co-op Party’s endorsement of Huw clearly also counted for something.

In the last thread, Jeff Jones asked when the actual voting figures would become available. The answer from Transport House, I’m told, is never. Percentages will have to do. Ho hum.

OUR formal coverage of the Labour leadership contest draws to a close today – and not a moment too soon probably!

Moving forward, here’s a reminder on timelines which you might find useful as you roadmap from Rhodri to his successor. Betsan also has an useful guide, including telling us where some of the parties are at tonight.

Tuesday December 8th:
Rhodri Morgan AM will stay on until this date to see the budget for 2010-11 passed. He will resign later that day by communicating with HM The Queen.

Wednesday December 9th:
The Queen is expected to accept the resignation and the First Minister and Counsel General will then be deemed to have resigned. All the Special Advisers to the Welsh Assembly Government will also depart at this point.

During Plenary session a motion will be moved to nominate a First Minister and the winner of the Labour leadership election will be formally nominated. It is not anticipated that they will be opposed.

This nomination will then need to be approved by The Queen, after which the new First Minister will need to be sworn in. Once this is done the new First Minister can begin to recommend Ministers to join the Welsh Assembly Government.

Any Ministers that are not being replaced or moved will not need to be recommended to The Queen. The other names will be submitted to The Queen.

Thursday December 10th:
The Cabinet and Welsh Assembly Government reshuffle is due to be completed and the full list of Ministers will be published.

The current make-up of the Welsh Assembly Government is:

• First Minister
• Counsel General
• 8 Ministers (currently 5 Labour, 3 Plaid Cymru)
• 4 Deputy Ministers (currently 3 Labour, 1 Plaid Cymru)

The overall balance between the numbers of Labour and Plaid Ministers is not likely to change, though there could possibly be structural changes that affect all portfolios.

The new First Minister will also appoint the Special Advisers to the Welsh Assembly Government (capped at 8). These currently divide 5 Labour and 3 Plaid Cymru.

THE quote above isn’t from Team Carwyn. It comes from his defeated rival, Huw Lewis.

And there can be little doubt about its veracity. The Bridgend AM managed not only to win at the first round (in other words he got more than 50% of the vote), he also won in each of the three sections of Labour’s electoral college. Many people – this site included – predicted a Carwyn win. Few predicted such a conclusive victory.

We’ve already posted the rough figures, but for those interested in the precise shares they were:

• Carwyn Jones AM 51.97%
• Edwina Hart AM 29.19%;
• Huw Lewis AM 18.8%.

And for those who want the exact breakdown by college section, they are:

Round One	Edwina Hart	Carwyn Jones	Huw Lewis	Total
Elected Members	9.4340	16.9811	6.9182	33.3333
Individual Members	8.4427	17.9046	6.9860	33.3333
Affiliated Organisations	11.3088	17.0893	4.9352	33.3333
TOTAL	29.1854	51.9751	18.8395	100%

That’s it for this live blog, folks. Hope you found it useful. The overall shares were Carwyn 52%, Edwina 29%, Huw 19%. More detail to follow on other posts.

Welcome to the live blog of the Welsh Labour Leadership declaration from The Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay. From around 17.30 hrs you will be able to get live updates of the result and declaration.

Click to refresh page

If you are around at 5.30 this evening, please pay us a visit. Daran will be live blogging the results of the Labour leadership contest from the Wales Millennium Centre.

It should be fun. If you’re us, anyway.

I SPEND my life living with, observing and writing about leaders. Much of the debate in this area tends to focus in on the individual qualities of leaders and what may be appropriate for a particular time or environment. But this is the wrong way of viewing the issue. It is confusing the individual leader with the process of leadership.

Our environment – burning issues of the day, desirable leadership qualities, public priorities – is ultimately socially constructed and shaped by language. It is not a question of a particular set of qualities that happen to fit a pre-defined, independently existing and provable reality. The way we as consumers of the political product and how they, the political leaders, form a judgement on what kind of leadership we require is much more complicated than that and is seeped with concerns of power. Power is not a possession, held by an individual, office or for that matter populace, a set of traits able to be called into action to achieve a specific goal. No, power is negotiated between people and objects. Hegemonies of power are dynamic and are constantly being formed and reformulated through a conversation and debate between agents, be that of a covert or overt nature. So what are the practical consequences of this for the way we view leadership in the Welsh context?

It has implications for the way in which we as citizens relate to our leaders and for the manner in which they deal with us. There is a sickness in the UK, and in Wales especially, the symptoms of which are a passive acceptance of ‘strong’ leaders who order us around and tell us what to do. We don’t like to take much responsibility for the state of the nation but prefer to snipe away in letters pages, down the pub and on radio talk shows. Equally, when we perceive things to be going well, we lurch to the other extreme and deify our leaders. This is the football manager syndrome: Hail the boss as the messiah in the good times, then crucify the same messiah when things go bad. This addiction of ours to directive leader-follower relations is especially dangerous in a time of recession. Crises have a peculiar way of pushing people into making decisions that seem, with the benefit of hindsight, quite baffling. For proof of this, witness the horror of the vast majority of US citizens when they finally woke up to the duping of the nation under the disastrous presidency of George W Bush. Yet, in a time of perceived crisis, with the threat of global terrorism all too real for thousands of people, citizens were willing to accept poorly thought-out macho actions. The right questions were not asked until later and it all seemed perfectly logical at the time.

The point here is that, as power is a negotiated phenomenon, leaders are able to influence the environment as much, if not more often, than other agents. President Bush was able to convince the nation of the existence of crisis and it was only until a more persuasive Barack Obama and a more receptive populace came into existence four years later that the case for a more measured, considered public policy stance was able to be countenanced.

In the context of Wales, we have heard much from Edwina Hart about her ‘strength’ as a leader, that she is capable of taking the tough decisions for the benefit of Wales. In her words, “it takes strong leadership, and political determination, to make the machinery of government work for progressive agendas”. This is her pitch, based on a construction of her image as a Welsh Maggie Thatcher. But we must not accept these sorts of claims uncritically. Perceived strength can very easily become stubbornness and an unwillingness to listen.

Take the debacle over the neurosurgery debate in north Wales or the fear among many that the present health reform proposals threaten to create an over-centralized, bossy system. The essence of such a political approach places citizens in the role of children and the state as parent. Her ideology for the management of public services is “voice not choice”. But this is deeply flawed. The philosophy is that patients will be empowered by the powerful centre to speak up about problems in delivery and therefore will have no need to change provider. And how will Mrs Hart empower people to do this? Through community health councils. I challenge anyone reading this article to walk onto any council estate in Wales and ask people if they feel like engaging with the meetings of their local CHC. It is worth gambling the deeds to my house that the take-up would be no higher than a percentage point at best. This is unimaginative stuff.

So what we are left with is a swathe of people, mostly from poorer backgrounds, without much voice at all. Surely the best way of helping people to ‘co-create’ services is by allowing them some say over how and by whom they are treated. This is their money being spent after all. It does not belong to the government or to Mrs Hart. People are not stupid and when given the opportunity to engage in their own services in a real way, through the allocation of funds, they will be far more likely to take an interest in public value than if offered some misleading, flawed and abstract notion of “voice”. Ultimately, of course, the voice system only benefits the better off, those more comfortable with the machinery of institutions and more at ease with kicking up a stink about service offerings.

Another characteristic of such a ‘strong’ leadership relationship tends to be an unwillingness to accept outside influence. It is the creation of silo thinking, a ‘them and us’ attitude. We have seen disturbing flashes of this in Mrs Hart’s refusal to engage with UK Labour Party conferences and in her general hostility towards Welsh MPs. A section in her manifesto should send alarm bells ringing amongst every Labour member in Wales:

We need to argue for a new constitutional relationship between the Labour Party in Wales and the UK party, so as better to reflect the devolution of political authority and range of responsibilities exercised here in Wales.

Why? What is wrong with being part of a strong UK party? Some people this have framed it in financial terms, that the immediate result of any form of federalized party system would be Welsh Labour more closely approximating a skeletal Lib Dem organization than that of a party of power. This is a valid view but there are deeper objections. The Welsh party already enjoys its own policy making process and sets its own election priorities. So it is difficult to view this as anything other than an abandonment of our party in Westminster, to which our Welsh MPs make a valued contribution, not to mention Scotland, a view that when the going gets tough, Wales will bail out.

In these times of economic difficulty, surely we need more joint working between nations, not less, both in policy and financial terms. It is a separatist agenda that will fuel the fire behind the accusation hanging over Mrs Hart that she is too close to Plaid. This is a fear held in north east Wales, in constituencies like Delyn, Alyn and Deeside, Wrexham and others. It is shared in the Gwent valley seats of Islwyn, Torfaen, Blaenau Gwent and many more. In fact this should not just be a concern of these well-known anti-nationalist communities. It should be worry all party members. Do we want to be a party in Wales of increasing isolation or one of active and critical engagement with partners? Constructing walls around Welsh Labour, and, in broader terms, Wales will not help us out of recession.

Strength may of course appear in a more positive guise, one in which a leader pushes followers to come up with bigger, brighter, more ambitious ideas and plans. Yet there have been precious few of these yet from the Mrs Hart camp. It has been a disappointing campaign for her. Yet there is still time to turn it around, to engage more with the media and to adopt a more challenging, rather than directive approach. The coming weeks will prove telling.

The Edwina Hart campaign has stood in stark contrast with those of Huw Lewis and Carwyn Jones. Huw, as always, has displayed an infectious enthusiasm for the causes of regeneration and child poverty. Even if he is a bit too centralist at times, without him this contest would have been much the poorer. His is an important voice that needs to be heard at the heart of government and even if he does not manage to pull off an incredible underdog victory, he will have convinced many people of the justness of his cause.

Carwyn Jones has fought the kind of campaign we would expect from him. It has sought to build broad alliances of people from every part of Wales. It has been outward-facing, has listened to people and yet challenged at the same time. He clearly understands the long-term challenge of reviving Wales from the grassroots, beginning with a radically improved education offer. Out of all the candidates it is Carwyn who has most shown the capacity for statesmanship.

To borrow and perhaps more appropriately apply Edwina Hart’s lexicon, both Carwyn and Huw have genuinely used this campaign to “co-create” a new reality with party members, with some imaginative new ideas and much needed critical engagement the result. They have attempted to raise the tone of debate in our nation and they should both be applauded for that.

So, ultimately, this is not a question of who possesses the most suitable innate leadership skills. The world around us is not fixed, an independently and scientifically verifiable place. We as citizens have as much right to negotiate the meaning of leadership and power as do the politicians. We must be wary of all this talk of strength and instant, decisive decision making because all too often such words lead us down the path towards diktat and centralization. Politicians don’t possess the power any more than we do as citizens. It’s all up for grabs. So be careful what you agree to give away in a time of crisis.

HOW nice at last that the finishing post is almost overrun.

Yes, the campaign’s been long, and I can’t pretend that I’ve been all that caught up in it, owing mainly to its lengths and to a major change in personal circumstances. The effect of this has been twofold – learning the ropes of a new job, and being far more interested in my own party’s business than in Labour’s affairs.

But what marks this contest out, to my mind, has been the maturity with which it has been fought. All kinds of plots and maneuvering have been speculated upon, predominantly from outside the party. But none of it has stuck, mainly because it has been wrong. All of the three candidates deserve to give themselves a pat on the back tomorrow evening, regardless of whether they have won or not.

If you believe that a contest is won by the team (or candidate) that becomes stronger the longer it goes on, then Carwyn has certainly grown in stature, and perhaps enough to slip into those big boots of Rhodri’s that I wrote about yesterday. He has come across as a unifier, a steady hand, business as usual. That is more likely to appeal to the man or woman in the street, particularly in this time, although I have to say that I’m still not sure what marks him out as something different. And will his straight bat be enough for Labour’s rank-and-file?

Huw is sometimes described as his party’s Marmite candidate. He has a reputation for making foes. I wouldn’t know about that, but he was a major force in the Labour-Plaid Valleys conflict of the past decade – the political equivalent of the Medallin wars, people whacked in the street, all that caper. What he has demonstrated this time round is that he is pretty adept as a political thinker. If he doesn’t win, he should have a major input into his party’s policy. His thoughts on housing provided his best moment for me, and his positioning alongside Jon Cruddas (calling it an alliance might be stretching it) may stand him in good stead following the General Election. We’re getting to the stage where most of us can discern between a good Parliamentarian and a decent Assembly-err-tarian(?) Who knows? Maybe another future for Huw lies down the M4.

But the real revelation has been Edwina. She had a reputation lower than shark’s pooh on a diver’s boot among journalists. I can remember her torpedoing the female AMs-only picture in those heady days of 1999 when the Siambr featured an equal number of women as men. It was an incredibly positive story, and her churlishness at the time earned her a lot of enemies in the press. But what has become apparent in this election is that she does enjoy a wide base of support. Previously, us cynical hacks had put it down to a sizeable, and easily manipulated beer-and-sandwiches brigade in Swansea. But when behemoths like Paul Murphy become convinced by her, then perhaps she was worth a look.

Another interesting development with Edwina: as time has worn on, those people that have done business with her (in her preferred manner, often in one-to-ones and always behind closed doors) began to emerge to sing her praises. Rather than grow weary of her, interest in the health minister has grown. Maybe it’s an enigma thing, but this bit of press exposure has done her no harm at all.

All-in-all, and given some of the handbags-at-dawn that previous succession battles have more closely resembled, this has been more like a cup of tea and cucumber sandwiches with the vicar. Too early to say if this is the start of something new in Welsh politics, and it could all be up in smoke in days if the party decides to follow Hain and not so much renege as try and faff its way out of the core promise on further powers that it made to Plaid when the two entered coalition.

Therein lies the rub, I suppose. No end of decorum may have made this easier on the eye than the teenage spats of yesteryear, but the history books will remember the new Labour leader for his or her deeds in office, not the campaign they fought.

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.

SO there goes only the fourth ever times in which the Welsh Labour Party has picked a leadership figure. I cannot say “elected” as it is dubious that any of the previous three occasions truly qualify for such a term. The first saw Ron Davies, enraged at Rhodri Morgan’s decision to even dare stand against him, triumph through extensive arm-twisting, not to mention a 91% share of the union vote. The second, known universally as “the stitch-up”, needs no elaboration, having been the subject of more academic and journalistic attention than any other event in modern Welsh political history. It, of course, directly caused the third, a coronation in which as one Cabinet member joked at the time, there were three candidates: “Rhodri Morgan, Rhodri Morgan and Rhodri Morgan”.

The fact that Labour has finally managed to conduct a fair, open and largely democratic* contest is by itself nothing for the party to shout about. But it is also the first time the party has chosen from a slate of candidates reared exclusively on devolved politics. In fact, when the new Leader gives his or her victory speech tomorrow evening Wales will finally have a party led by someone who has not even attempted to sit in Westminster. A First Minister with no first-hand experience of Westminster politics will, for both good and bad, bring a new perspective to the job.

It has also been a largely clean fight, to the obvious disappointment of Labour’s opponents. Their affectation of boredom ought to be a huge compliment to the three teams, to the party’s Executive and to General Secretary Chris Roberts. Excitement in these terms is measured by the fratricidal blood-letting, and instances of control-freakery. A single process story about the pre-screening of questions at the official hustings and a few coded rebukes hardly count.

But that does not mean it has been a success in Labour’s terms, an occasion for the party to examine and renew itself. 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. If the leaders’ candour here is matched by action, there might be progress. But it is doubtful how much the Welsh party can defy the political gravity of the UK as whole, especially given its relative under-performance in recent elections.

The policy battleground has been very narrow, with the candidates triangulated by the prospect of large budget reductions, an agreed programme of coalition government, and the perennial limitations of the Assembly’s powers. Differences have emerged in areas such as the use of nuclear power, and it would be wrong to ignore the raft of new ideas in areas such as health, children and families and the economy. But this has not been a campaign where any candidate has been able to back up a bold new direction for the party with a wholly new policy programme.

Nonetheless, each candidate has grown in stature during the campaign, and each has dispelled many of the negatives hitherto attached to them. Edwina has demonstrated that she would be an able and engaging media performer as First Minister. Carwyn’s alleged laziness has been consigned to myth through a campaign that – eventually – produced a full platform of policies and projected the Bridgend AM’s energy and authority. Huw Lewis, meanwhile, has emerged as a figure of gravitas, able to communicate a compelling and coherent vision for his party.

Inevitably, attention now turns to the question of the new Cabinet, and whether all three should be in it. Paul Murphy, whose only other contribution to the race was to prompt a rash of head-scratching over his endorsement of Edwina Hart, thinks they should. Everyone else thinks it depends in what position each finishes, and how much they command of the party membership’s support. Surely the only question the new FM needs to ask themselves is whether Labour’s 26-strong group boasts four or five more talented members than the two defeated candidates?

After those considerations, the genuinely hard work begins. The leadership race has been conducted inside the confines of Welsh politics. It has not permeated the media troposphere – such events never do – and it has not been interrupted by UK politics. To be a success, the new leader needs to change the former, projecting a vision of his/her party and administration beyond the pundits and party faithful, and work with the grain of the latter. A leadership conducted in terms of Welsh politics only is unrealistic, especially with an impending and almost certainly painful General Election.

Beyond that, the task is even more daunting, and not only because of the size of the shoes to be filled. Labour has never been out of power in Cardiff bay, and the baggage of incumbency weighs heavily. The party’s master plan for recovery seems to be to hope that a future Tory government at Westminster will appear so wicked as to make people more grateful for Labour rule. That is a calculation that the electorate appear less willing to settle for nowadays, and rightly so. Nor is it all all obvious that voters will instantly blame the Tories for the cuts in spending that must surely follow. Inspired, purposeful, result-heavy government is needed. The target must be to achieve what Rhodri Morgan  could not; to sustain a Wales that outperforms the rest of the UK, and demonstrably closes the gap. If this could be managed Labour’s new leader would achieve what Gordon Brown has shown to be so difficult; renewal while in office. Precedent, gravity and theory are all against the new leader, but he or she will have a head start: by Wednesday morning that person will already be the most successful elected Welsh Labour leader of all time.

This is the first of three posts by the Co-Editors of WalesHome.org today dealing with the Labour leadership election. Daran and Duncan will continue later with their summary take on the biggest Welsh political story of 2009.

* Spare a thought for the handful of electors lucky enough to cast five votes, one of which was worth a whopping 0.6% of the total electoral college.

IT’S often argued, and widely believed, that the bubble operates in an atmosphere all of its own. There is Wales, and then there is its political class. Or that there is politics and then there is the rest of them. The plebs.

Thus it was ever so. That’s why Romans terminology still resonates. So there must be a grain of truth in it. Few things will silence the arguments and guarantee unification more surely than an attack on Welsh politics from out there in the cold. And the political class is right to feel uncomfortable with such an automatic reaction, as it suggests self-interest and runs counter to the spirit of public service.

This week, though, the bubble broke ranks. It took an interloper in the form of the Secretary of State for Wales to trigger it, although he couldn’t be blamed for loading the gun. By last Thursday, a general weariness had descended on the Bay, a torpor brought on by yet another episode – and a bloody long episode at that – of Labour making key decisions while turned inwards, only to about by 180 degrees to discover that it had driven Welsh governance up a cul-de-sac. Even those with most to gain had become bored with the game and had taken their ball home.

This may seem harsh. Labour remains the most popular party in Wales (at least by last election’s results), and it is in the midst of a very important passage in its modern history, searching out a replacement to fill out the vast political outline of Rhodri Morgan. Even if you didn’t sign up to the near-supercilious cap-doffing to his brilliance as a leader that went ahead in the Siambr on Wednesday, it can at least be agreed that he has worn the biggest boots in Welsh politics for at least the past decade.

What has followed Rhodri’s demobbing is a clean if far, far too lengthy leadership campaign. All three candidates can take comfort from the races they have run – and this cannot be interpreted as any passing of judgement on their individuals claims to the crown – but I am personally bored to tears with it all. I think my attention dissipated towards the end of week two. No doubt there is party policy that explains this ponderous process, and it doesn’t demonstrate disciplined writing to admit that I haven’t been bothered to check, but I’m guessing such indolence will chime.

So far, so uninteresting. But then matters really fell apart this week, revealing a juvenility in power that we have sadly experienced before. Who really knows what the real series of events it was that led us into the shooting-in-the-foot that was Labour’s joint response to the All Wales Convention? There were multitude different accounts, and they only served to fuel the rumour mill on Cardiff’s shoreline: Rhodri couldn’t carry his group on the response; the press release had been much watered down; that it was a Rhodri plot, a final piece of payback from the First Minister to the Welsh Secretary, retribution for Hain’s backing of Alun Michael all those years ago and evidence of the man’s reputed undying enmity towards those that cross him.

Whatever, the interloper (that’s how he’s regarded these days, an intruder from airless Westminster corridors) quickly copped the blame. It’s partly Hain’s own fault. If you make a reputation as a kite flyer, as he did for many years in the Blair government, you can hardly claim contusions when you are perceived to be taking the mickey. And he should know by now that certain sorts in the Wales will always be looking out for him to do so, with a super-sensitivity that makes me wonder if they have Hain radars on their roofs. But it is easy for the rest of us to be convinced by Hain’s motives this time, and perhaps damn him for them. He must have glimpsed the end of Labour government, and it would be unnatural for a man so reputedly ambitious, a man who could reasonably believe that his political career could carry on beyond a switch of administration, to seek a dead hand in the leadership of Welsh Labour, a whisperer behind the throne. It could be his only fiefdom before long.

(And, where Hain is concerned, it is easy for the conspiracy theorists to start conjecturing. Here’s one I made earlier. What if he decided to take the hit in readiness for Thursday, so that the Government could announce yet again that it had brought in expertise, this time in the enormously-talented Gerry Holtham, and had overseen a lengthy inquiry only to fudge its recommendations? No doubt there are others. It’s almost worth WalesHome starting a new blog and calling it Peter’s Perceived Plans. It will be rammed in a fortnight.)

Hain came out fighting. This was interpreted as his pitch to Labour’s rank-and-file, as he attempted to make a nine-parts-farcical argument for a near-reneging on perhaps the most central plank of the One Wales agreement, claiming – we think – that a referendum that can’t be won is a referendum not worth fighting. 1979 was invoked. 1997, too. Devolution would be put back 20 years if Wales said No. All supremely perplexing and all largely academic.

The LCO system must go. It is a snippy, bitsy way of doing business, so it makes sense to campaign for a Yes vote, because it will bring far swifter legislation, and that benefits Wales. But it is supremely rich for Labour to have driven us into this dead end and then complain that the satnav might be shonky. It could have gone to the country over Richard. Instead, it dithered for five years, terrified by how its bruised and bruising Jurassic membership might react, before framing a second inquiry, only to shrink from its timid recommendations on the grounds that victory is not certain. Certainly not among its own ranks. Even the Tories are now more progressive on devolution.

And in all if this, the Government has still failed to answer one of the fundamentals, a question likely to unify all those anti-anoraks. Why is the pace of devolution at such a crawl? We’ve had a decade of devolution now, a record to assess. Why is it that Scotland and Northern Ireland move faster. We subsist, they feast. What marks Wales out as different in this regard?

It is this aspect of the past week that makes me deeply angry, along with what lies behind it. This unmerry little dance crosses the floor only as a means of allowing the Labour party to lead it. Perhaps we should not be surprised. Squeeze Welsh Labour ever so slightly, and it spasms into self-regard and self-preservation, all the while making life that bit tougher for the new leader, and electoral success two years hence that much more elusive.

But this dance – we’ve been here before. Each and every internecine contortion behoves Labour’s leader – its new leader – to take bolder and ever-longer strides. Strides longer than a leadership contest.