Melding bows out, a last bastion of high standards and erudition
Conservative AM David Melding has announced he will not contest next year’s Senedd election. Chief reporter Martin Shipton wonders whether he is the last One Nation Tory
THE plaudits for David Melding that have followed the news that he is to step down from the Senedd next year – by which time he will have served for 22 years as a regional AM for South Wales Central – resonate with a sense of nostalgia.
His departure was described by people from across the political spectrum as the end of an era – and there was no doubt that the era he represented was seen as a positive one.
Responding to the praise that was heaped upon him, Mr Melding tweeted: “Heartfelt thanks to all who have taken the trouble to leave generous posts. What a jewel is a free society where the respectful exchange of ideas is valued. We all need to recharge our batteries with some constructive political conversation!”
Now that his decision to leave the Senedd is public knowledge, the concise daily blog that he has been writing and publishing in recent months – entitled The Last of the Unionists – has greater pertinence.
Throughout the whole of its history to date, Mr Melding has brought to the National Assembly an urbanity and erudition it has otherwise often lacked.
He is an unusual politician, for whom the grubby business of seeking votes is out of character.
In that respect he has benefited from the Senedd’s dual electoral system.
From the outset he has been elected on his party’s regional list – and ironically has kept his seat because the Conservatives under-performed on election day. Had they done better, and won more first-past-the-post seats, the party would not have been entitled to so many regional seats, and as the perennial number two in South Wales Central he would not have survived.
Mr Melding did, in fact, stand against the similarly long-serving Jane Hutt in the Vale of Glamorgan in the first two Assembly elections, but lost on both occasions and got elected because of his place on the list.
Simplistic sloganising of the kind that is increasingly fashionable in political discourse has never been to Mr Melding’s taste.
It’s difficult not to conclude that the direction politics has taken has played a part in his decision – although he’d probably be too loyal to his party to say so.
In a podcast with me last year, he regretted the decision to leave the EU, and said it would make it more difficult to argue that the UK should continue.
He told me: “I think if you’re open to larger entities, which is what first constructed the UK, then you should also be open to new ways of working on a continental level, which is what the EU is about.
“I think we’re going to see in terms of trading policy that we’ll still have to be very much aware of what’s happening in Europe.
“We’re going to have to co-operate a lot in terms of environmental issues, simply because that’s the space that now needs to be tackled. You can’t really have an independent environmental policy in Britain that’s completely at odds with what’s happening in Europe.
“We will want to influence their decisions and they’ll want us to be making decisions that don’t cause them great challenges and difficulties, in terms of if we were polluting a lot, or they were.
“That’s why you have international organisations – it’s to really give you a greater sense of control and power over issues like international trade and the environment, and security through Nato. I’ve always been comfortable about that.”
Yet this week Boris Johnson and Michael Gove have made it clear that they do, indeed, want to deviate from the EU in all spheres – and that any suggestion to the contrary is beyond the pale.
Self-harm, it seems, is the political orthodoxy of the UK Government, so long as it represents a blow against alignment with European standards.
It’s easy to see why Mr Melding would consider such a narrative uncongenial.
And Boris Johnson is not the kind of Tory leader one senses Mr Melding approves of.
It used to be accepted that political parties were broad churches, and that a fairly wide spectrum of views could be contained within them. We have seen how the Labour Party has been damaged by the aggressive factionalism that has come to dominate it in recent years.
The Conservative Party is dealing with its internal differences in another way – by taking out those who don’t conform to the leader’s wishes. Every one of the rebels who disagreed with Mr Johnson on Brexit is now out of Parliament. For the time being, those who transgress have no future.
While Mr Melding has been given a licence to pursue his erudition in Cardiff Bay, the way his party is going would naturally lead him to the conclusion that there was no place for him in it.
The Conservative Party now belongs to the populist right, for whom baiting foreigners and the economically inactive is fair game and compassion is a redundant emotion. Donald Trump and Viktor Orban are figures to be revered rather than Benjamin Disraeli and Harold Macmillan.
No wonder David Melding is leaving to spend more time with his think-tank.