General election diary reveals party squabbles
ITV Cymru Wales political editor Adrian Masters has published a diary about this year’s General Election. Chief reporter Martin Shipton says the book exposes splits in both the Conservative and Labour parties
FEW would dispute that this year’s General Election was the most memorable for decades. When the election was called it would have been difficult to find anyone who disagreed with the prediction that Theresa May would storm to a landslide victory.
But in fact there was a huge churn in voting intention during the campaign and, while not enough to deliver the election to Labour, it was enough to ensure that the Conservatives lost their majority.
In Wales there was astonishment when an early opinion poll showed the Conservatives 10 points ahead of Labour and poised to win the majority of seats for the first time in the fully democratic era. The result, weeks later, saw Labour winning three Tory seats. In between, many people reassessed their view of the election – and many more younger people than usual decided to take part.
In his diary of the election campaign – Nothing Has Changed – ITV Cymru Wales political editor Adrian Masters focuses on the party splits that affected both the Conservatives and Labour.
It’s an old adage that people within political parties dislike each other more than they dislike their political opponents – we have certainly had that in abundance in 2017.
With the Conservatives, the split was most evident in rows over the imposition of candidates and over who would represent the party in the TV debates. There was resentment in at least three seats considered winnable where candidates were seen as being imposed against the will of local activists. One activist in Bridgend told Masters the party hierarchy was “closing ranks and bullying us”.
On the TV debates row, Masters writes: “‘Something about a holiday’ doesn’t even come close to explaining why Andrew RT Davies wasn’t at the Conservative Welsh manifesto launch in Gresford [near Wrexham] but it’s the answer I scribbled in my notebook when I asked about his absence.
“There was a holiday involved ... but there was much more to it than that. He had originally planned to be at the launch because he had also expected to take part in one of the BBC Wales election programmes nearby in Rhos-on-Sea. However that weekend the agreement between him and [Welsh Secretary] Alun Cairns had broken down when it was decided that Cairns should take part in ‘Ask the Leader’ instead of Davies. Two days before that programme, on the night of Saturday, May 20, a close aide to the Welsh Secretary rang Davies and told him the decision. The Welsh Tory leader said, ‘Look, this has been handled appallingly. If you’re going to bump me on Monday, you’ve got to do the last debate, the main BBC one, and there’s no way I’m going to come back [from holiday] and do that.”
The seemingly petty row rumbled on and eventually it was agreed that Clwyd West AM Darren Millar would do the BBC Wales debate after Alun Cairns refused to take part.
Such tensions between politicians over what can be seen as peripheral matters often reflect deeper disagreements. In the case of the Conservatives, one of their re-elected MPs told Masters after the election that it was the worst campaign he’d been involved in.
The unnamed MP said: “We hadn’t had time to prepare. The manifesto was clearly put together in a hurry, self-evidently because it fell apart in a hurry too. We had not only bad election materials, printed materials, we actually had a lack of printed materials to the extent that we spent the entire campaign essentially relying on one printed document.”
Labour too had its split, with most party workers out of kilter with Jeremy Corbyn, whose name wasn’t mentioned once in the Welsh manifesto and who was seen as a sure-fire loser.
A senior member of Welsh Labour’s campaign team told Masters: “The overarching feel was one of ‘We’re f***ed. The feedback from the doorstep was grim. There was an absolute and unshakeable belief on behalf of many of the Welsh Parliamentary Labour Party that they were toast. You even had long-standing Welsh parliamentary colleagues gifting their offices at the end of the session because they thought they wouldn’t be reoccupying them. There was an absolute sense that we were in big trouble and this absolutely wasn’t ‘finger in the wind’ stuff.”
It might as well have been – as the Labour insider found out soon enough, Jeremy Corbyn transformed over the course of the campaign into an electoral asset.
Nothing Has Changed by Adrian Masters is published by Parthian at £8.99