‘As a teenager, Rhodri Morgan cancelled his subscription to Wizard and Hotspur when he discovered Hemingway and Steinbeck’
THE question everyone who had the privilege of knowing Rhodri Morgan will ask as this incredible season of politics unfolds is “What would Rhodri make of this?”
You can imagine the glee with which he would have greeted the shock nine-point bounce for Labour in the latest Welsh opinion poll. This would see Labour not just hang on to its tally of MPs but gain a seat and comes on the heel of polls which had the Tories winning 20-plus constituencies.
The former First Minister relished this rollercoaster nature of politics. He was captivated by the dramas that can rage at the heart of democracy – and he participated in more than a few.
A defining moment came at the age of 11 when he dragged his mother to a political meeting where Dorothy Rees, the Labour MP for Barry, was reduced to tears after being shouted down by, as he put it, “hooray Henries”.
The intensity of emotion gripped this academically brilliant schoolboy. He could have pursued a contented life in academia or the civil service but the desire to get onto the political pitch was impossible to resist and at the age of 47 he won a seat in Parliament.
What would have happened if he had made it there 20 years earlier? What if, instead of becoming a shadow minister in the energy team led by Tony Blair, it had been the other way round? How might the future Prime Minister’s own approach to politics have changed if he had been mentored by Mr Morgan?
Mr Blair did not want Mr Morgan to lead Welsh Labour and the Cardiff West politician was thwarted in two leadership contests before taking the reins of the Assembly at a time when the institution was buffeted by crisis. The opposition Mr Morgan faced from Mr Blair is even harder to understand now that we know how he led the Assembly for nearly a decade.
Yes, he introduced free prescriptions for all and had no interest in driving up the role of the private sector in public services, allowing “clear red water” to flow between the Assembly and Westminster.
But he did not try and turn Wales into a giant Marxist commune and he did not use the First Ministership to attack the Blair Governments. Mr Morgan may not have been a creature of New Labour but he was certainly not a member of the hard left.
In a Western Mail column in 2015 he argued: “There is a mile-wide gap between Tony Blair’s New Labour project and Jeremy Corbyn’s hard left position. It was that mile-wide gap that I was trying to fill.”
He was comfortable with the politics of Neil Kinnock and John Smith which were about “electability but with Labour principles of social justice and redistribution firmly in place”. This, he argued, was “Classic Labour”.
If the Assembly hadn’t existed he could have still played a full role pursuing his values in Westminster but instead this nation was the focus of his extraordinary energies.
Although he argued that his politics were in line with what Labour pursued at Westminster “between 1983 and 1994” it is not quite as simple as that.
His leadership was defined by a burning sense of nationhood and a belief in where both the Assembly and Wales could go in the future.
There are vexed discussions about how centre-left parties can recapture patriotism and convey excitement about the future. Mr Morgan lacked neither, as demonstrated by the passion he displayed when cheering on Welsh sporting teams or trumpeting a business success.
He loved telling people of Wales’ link to the so-called Miracle on the Hudson, when US Airways Flight 1549 made an emergency landing on the New York river without any loss of life. The sight of passengers safely awaiting rescue on wings manufactured by Airbus in north Wales went around the world.
“They were all standing on Welsh wings,” he said in 2009.
“That’s part of our brand now, in the same way that having two Nobel prize-winning scientists on the staff of Cardiff University is part of Wales’ brand now.”
As a teenager, Mr Morgan cancelled his subscription to Wizard and Hotspur when he discovered Hemingway and Steinbeck. American friends at Oxford persuaded him to try and get a place at Harvard, where his already broad horizons widened even further.
There is a great tradition of people born in Wales going on to achieve glittering success beyond its borders and fondly talking of how they miss their home. Mr Morgan had no intention of abandoning Wales.
He returned from Massachusetts and, as Professor Peter Stead recounted in a fascinating 2009 portrait of Mr Morgan, a “Harvard jogger” was soon seen exercising in Roath Park.
Mr Morgan was at the heart of a tight-knit set of Cardiff Labour activists. Prof Stead recalled: “The Labour Party has never seemed so informed, relaxed, relevant and rooted in genuine comradeship. Rhodri was a cherished member of that group, always joshed for his academic eccentricities of dress and punctuality.”
This fond joshing would continue for a lifetime and his scruffiness became an electoral selling point.
We live in an era when politicians strive to manufacture an appearance of conventionality in a bid to strike a connection with a disengaged public and there is pressure on every MP and AM to prove they “have a life”. This was never a struggle for Mr Morgan.
His love for Cardiff Blues was never an affectation; voters delighted in bumping into the First Minister at Ikea or by the stalls of the city’s Riverside farmers’ market. He lived with authenticity and refused to either dumb down or spruce up.
Perhaps because he only entered full-time politics relatively late in life he never seemed to lose sight of what a privilege it is to earn a living pursuing a vocation so rich in opportunity and experience.
People who are still in the very earliest stages of their careers will cherish memories of campaigning with him in recent months.
His example will inspire members of different parties to embrace the challenges of democracy with courage, curiosity and even joy.