Westminster and apart than ever as

There is frustration at the highest level of government in Wales at lack of engagement with Westminster on the political direction of the response to coronavirus, reports Acting Political Editor Will Hayward

“THE virus does not respect borders.” That was one of the first of many phrases that we heard in the early days of the crisis.

Coronavirus spread rapidly in Wales just as it did across the UK.

With the work, lives and families of people in all parts of the UK so heavily intertwined, it was inevitable that the governments in Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Westminster would want to work closely together to tackle it.

But now we are two months into lockdown and cracks are showing. Wales now has different messaging to the UK Government and some of the rules are not the same.

The First Minister has called out Westminster multiple times for not engaging with the devolved administrations.

However, when you speak to members of the UK Government the relationship is described as rosy with “unprecedented levels of engagement”. So what is going on?

By Mark Drakeford’s own admission things started off well.

In an interview yesterday he told the Western Mail: “We had a big flurry of meetings around the point where lockdown was being considered and brought into being.”

It was two weeks after lockdown when the first cracks began to show. With Boris Johnson in hospital and the UK Government refusing to make any announcement on the extension of lockdown, Mr Drakeford declared that Wales was keeping the lockdown rules for another three weeks to “allow people to plan for the week ahead”.

These cracks have only widened.

After Boris Johnson announced the move from “stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives” to his slightly vaguer message that people should “stay alert” there was a clear difference in messaging.

In England people could arrange to meet people in parks, sit down and relax in public outdoors and even drive to a beach.

People in Wales are still not able to arrange to meet family members or drive for exercise, although the rules around having food while out exercising was relaxed after Vaughan Gething was photographed eating chips with his family.

In the run up to the last lockdown extension Mark Drakeford upped his rhetoric again when he told a press conference there has now been no communication over lockdown since last week.

Mr Drakeford said: “This week has been one of the stops in the stop-start process.

“Last week in the run-up to the announcements [on lockdown changes] we had good meetings on four out of five days. But now a whole week has gone by without any meeting of that sort.”

The UK Government refutes the First Minister’s version of events.

In a letter seen by the Western Mail from Wales Secretary Simon Hart to Mark Drakeford on May 13, Mr Hart said: “The outcome of this review has seen our continuing commitment to a four-nation response to tackling Covid-19, with some divergence in the margins.

“This has only been possible because of the unprecedented levels of engagement between our two governments.

“I am pleased that you and members of your ministerial team have joined meetings of COBR(M) and the Ministerial Implementation Groups which are central to the UK government’s decision making.”

The Wales Office provided the Western Mail with a list of more than 100 meetings/conversations between the UK Government and the Welsh Government, though these were by no means all at ministerial level.

So is it a utopian time of unprecedented engagement or stop/start communication from two administrations that are drifting apart?

In reality it is perfectly possi