MORNING SERIAL
IN A virtual Senedd session Conservative Members challenged the First Minister on Mr Gething’s behaviour. Former Welsh Conservative leader Andrew RT Davies asked: “If any individual purchased food, eat it on a public bench, they would clearly be breaking the rules – should they apologise?”
To which Mr Drakeford responded that he wasn’t “going to get drawn into this sort of personality bashing” and that Mr Gething was entitled to privacy and could “speak for himself”. He said the question was “simply designed to attack an individual out with their family entitled, I would say, to some privacy in the way they were going about things and who will speak for himself”. Another Conservative,
Clwyd West MS Darren Millar, added that “It looks to the public it’s one rule for the health minister and another rule for them” to which Mr Drakeford responded a “brief stop to allow a child to eat is not a picnic in anybody’s language”. Luckily the First Minister managed to resist an explicit fuelled tirade after the session as his health minister had previously done in the Senedd.
Mr Gething was vociferous in his defence that nothing he did amounted to a breaking of the rules. Several opposition politicians went on to suggest that the fact the Welsh Government subsequently changed its exercise guidance to say that activities that are “good for people’s health or wellbeing” are also “considered to be reasonable” was a cynical attempt to absolve the health secretary retrospectively – a claim the Welsh Government strenuously denied.
Elsewhere the economy was under more pressure than Vaughan Gething. For weeks there had been concerns that the widely successful furlough scheme would be brought to an end because it was, well, too successful. With Chancellor Rishi Sunak suggesting that by the end of June the £40bn scheme would be costing the same amount to run as the NHS, the 7.5 million people in the UK who relied on it to pay some of their wages and the businesses who needed it to stay afloat were nervous about any changes.
> Lockdown Wales by Will Hayward £9.99 www.serenbooks.com/ productdisplay/lockdown-wales ISBN 9781781726013
CONTINUES TOMORROW