A HIGH-STAKES GAME OF POLITICAL CHICKEN
LEANNE Wood... Leighton’s nemesis; Carwyn’s nightmare; a party leader who has more cojones than a Spanish toreador taunting a bull with a red rag.
There is no hiding from it, she humbled the First Minister yesterday in the building he has dominated since taking the job some seven years ago.
The image of Carwyn Jones with his head in his hands after his nomination as First Minister failed tells a story that an avalanche of Labour tweets criticising Plaid cannot untell.
The simple truth is this: For the next five years, Labour can not rule in Wales without the help of their nationalist rivals.
Yet what is not yet clear is the price that Plaid will have to pay for that brief moment of triumph.
It is far from certain where this will end.
From the outside, it looks like this.
Labour dared Plaid to stand alongside the Tories and Ukip and risk being tarred by association if they blocked the nomination of Mr Jones and First Minister. But Plaid didn’t blink. Despite knowing the perception of having connived with the Tories will do their leader more damage in the Rhondda than almost any other Plaid politician, Leanne Wood and her party stood firm.
The message was this - there will be a price for our help, even if we have to weather a few storms to get it.
The maths to this are cruelly simple.
Labour’s 28 AMs (as the party’s deputy presiding officer Ann Jones does not get a vote) is not sufficient to allow them to pass their spending plans, or choose a First Minister, in a house of 60 AMs.
They need 30 votes. And that means that even if the single Liberal Democrat Kirsty Williams supports them, they still need at least one other AM not to stand in their way. Who will that be? It is hard to believe that Welsh Labour could risk being seen to do a deal with either the Tories or Ukip.
Just campaigning alongside the Tories in Scotland’s independence referendum did the Scottish Labour party immense damage; doing a deal in Wales might on its own be enough to end the party’s rule here as well.
Similarly, what damage would a deal with Ukip do?
This is a right wing party that supports leaving the EU and whose politics are toxic to many traditional Labour voters.
Unless Welsh Labour can engineer a defection from a rival party, that leaves only one option: Plaid.
The fascinating element to this is that what matters in the court of public opinion is very different to the reality.
Plaid yesterday were doing nothing more than playing hardball, demanding a price for allowing Carwyn Jones’ nomination as First Minister to pass.
Ask yourself this, would Labour in Westminster pass up an opportunity to humiliate a Tory leader, even if it meant they voted the same way as Ukip?
Would Plaid be fulfilling their responsibility to the people who supported them in the election if they turned down the opportunity to extract concessions as a price for supporting the government? It is not as if doing this provides a path for right wingers into government in Wales.
The Tories and Ukip gain nothing more from this than the satisfaction of seeing a Labour leader with his head in his hands.
Yet Labour politicians will now be desperate to ensure that the public don’t see it this way.
Yesterday afternoon, it was as if every senior Labour politician in Wales was putting out the same message on social media outlets and on news programmes.
Plaid got into bed with the Tories and Ukip; Plaid betrayed their promises; Plaid are showing their true colours; a vote for Plaid is a vote to put the Tories into government in Wales.
This game of political chicken is not yet over.
Within 28 days of the election, a First Minister will have to be in place or we will have to go to the polls and vote again.
If neither Plaid nor Labour are likely to want that, then how far are they willing to push this.
How much of this public criticism are Plaid willing to weather?
Any public concession risks seeming like a further humiliation for Labour.
A failure to extract a such a concession risks making Plaid look like amateur opportunists messing about with stable government for the fun of it.
In many ways, much of what some Labour politicians were saying yesterday was ridiculous.
If you don’t win an election outright, it is not other parties’ fault if you can’t get a First Minister elected and Wales doesn’t have a stable government.
Yet when repeated frequently and with conviction, it can become received wisdom.
This is just setting the scene for the next five years.
Unless something changes, the same political impasse will be repeated every time Labour needs to get something through the Senedd - whether is a budget or a controversial bill.
Plaid have chosen to show their strength at the very first available opportunity.
How this plays out will shape the next five years.
“If you don’t win an election outright, it is not other parties’ fault if you can’t get a First Minister elected and Wales doesn’t have stable government”