Mark Drakeford

Akash Paun (AP): You first entered government as a minister in 2013 as minister for health and social services. To start right at the beginning, what was the conversation that you had with first minister Carwyn Jones when he asked you to take on that portfolio? And what did he ask you specifically to lead on in that role?

Mark Drakeford (MD): I was in a committee meeting that morning and the message came to say – would I make my way up to Cathays [Cathays Park, the main offices of the Welsh government] to meet the first minister? You know you sort of have an inkling, you know you wouldn't be asked to do that if there wasn't something in the offing. Although there'd been no suggestion in the days leading up to it that there was anything about to happen here. And he said to me, just very straightforwardly really, would I be willing to be the minister for health in the Welsh government? 

It's never been a job that there is a long queue of people waiting and wanting to do. But I had been the special adviser on health and social policy during the first decade of devolution. I had chaired the Health Committee immediately on becoming an elected member. So in a sense, I had followed the whole history of health policy during the devolution period. I said yes straight away. Maybe I should have thought more about it really. 

There were a number of immediate things that needed to be attended to. The Organ Donation Bill [which became the Human Transplantation Act 2013] was in front of the Senedd and was in a bit of trouble and needed to be taken through to the statute book. And that was one of the first big uses of the legislative capacity that the Senedd had acquired in the 2011 referendum, so it was not just a bill of importance in its own right, but it was symbolically important because it was there to demonstrate that the Senedd could make use of the powers that it had acquired.

And then just all the normal challenges that there are in the health service: too many people waiting and capacity constraints, not enough money. We are now three years into the age of austerity and it is genuinely beginning to bite. The Labour government is under a lot of, to my mind, ill-founded criticism for having given a smaller uplift to the health service in Wales than had been given to the health service in England. So there were a series of knotty political issues that were probably very rapidly identified, but essentially I think, as in any reshuffle, once the first minister has got his agreement he's keen to move on because this is a jigsaw, isn't it? Or a pack of dominoes? Once he's got one person's agreement, and this probably was the first thing that he needed to get agreed, then he's keen to get on to the rest of the day.

AP: And how did it feel then? You'd had that experience working, obviously with the previous ministers and indeed first minister in this policy area. Did you therefore walk into the job feeling well prepared, like you knew what to expect, or was there something still that took you by surprise? That actually it was you having the decision making responsibility suddenly – how did that feel?

MD: I think I was as well prepared as anybody could be. You know, I knew the processes of government. I knew what the issues would be. Yet it was still a pretty overwhelming early experience. This happened in the ides of March, which is when, as a health minister, you're making a whole series of decisions about resources because of the end of the financial year. Money is either appearing or disappearing in different directions. And our very first weekend I was given a pile of submissions, as they’re called, which was literally three feet high, of things that needed to be decided that weekend. Some of them very small. Some of them pretty big. So although I felt very lucky that I knew what a submission was, I could identify what the different folders were meant to be, and I was very used to reading them and helping make decisions. Nevertheless, the actual doing of it and the sheer just volume of it in those early days was quite hard to deal with, I thought.

AP: And that was actually all on paper then – in a big box?

MD: Well, they all came in paper. Though everything was electronic as well. But I'm afraid I am too old, really, anything complicated I still prefer paper. If I need to look back on page eight to what was being said on page three, I'd rather be able to turn the pages and look rather than flick on the screen. Simple stuff I can do on the screen. Anything that needs a bit of concentration, I think, I'd prefer to see it.

AP: What was your immediate impression of the private office staff and the support you were given from the civil service?

MD: Pretty good straight away again – I probably knew everybody in the office. I would have worked with many of them over a decade. It was headed by a very experienced principal private secretary who was very well used to dealing with the flow of things.

In the Welsh government, things have changed over the years, in some ways not entirely to the advantage of ministers. In the very beginning and in the first decade, it was very ordinary for people to move between private offices and the rest of the Welsh government and there was quite a competition for places in private offices. Over the years that's changed. Private office places are harder to fill and they tend to be filled more by people whose careers are in the private office. Whose links therefore into the wider machinery of the Welsh government are not as personal as would have been true in the first decade, where people knew people and had worked with them and therefore were the bridge between the life of the Bay [Cardiff Bay, the seat of the Welsh parliament], the ministerial life, and the life of the machine. It was maybe closer than it's become since.

AP: That's interesting, is that something that has affected the effectiveness of the support for ministers, do you think?

MD: Well, it cuts both ways as these things usually do – don't they? It means that people that run private offices are very used to doing that. We don't have some of the disasters we had in the very, very early days in devolution with people in charge of diaries who used to struggle with the concept of days of the week. So in a sense you get a very experienced service now. But what you probably lack is just that ability to pick up the phone and speak to somebody you know. Because ‘I know the person dealing with this, I was working with them only a couple of months ago – I'll just pick up the phone and ask them’, you lose a bit of that. And that sometimes, I think, means you're more reliant on the process than the person. You get pluses and minuses both ways.

AP: In that first job, was there any particularly big challenge that you faced, or significant crisis that you had to deal with?

MD: A number. Well, the very first thing was to deal with the organ donation bill, as I said. The incoming health minister had to deal with the rather challenging report signed off by the chair of the health committee. It just happened that I was the same person. So I had signed off the stage 1 report on the bill and then inherited it as the minister. In those first few months that took a lot of time to get that bill properly on track and delivered. So that was a big challenge, but a successful one. You know I was very committed to the bill, I think it was very important to the Senedd and to devolution. It was very popular among the Welsh public, although highly controversial in some places. It was the completion of a 10-year journey, to get a change in the consent regime in Wales. And a very emotional one as well because you're very often dealing with families who either lost loved ones in donating organs or whose personal survival has depended upon receiving a donation. So it's high intensity that way as well.

The big challenges all the way through were money because you’re trying to match the reduction in resources to the growth in demand. It was the constant challenge. The biggest problem for a health minister in Wales is that it’s impossible to do what English ministers are able to do – to separate themselves from the daily running of the health service. An English health minister, dealing with the population of 50 million, can quite legitimately and plausibly say, “those are issues which managers on the ground in Billericay are meant to be dealing with”. You cannot do that in Wales. The scale of the place is so small, that anything that goes wrong – and you know the health service sees 2 million people, a month. Things are going to go wrong not every person is going to be on top of their form every day and people will get experiences which are not the ones we would want them to have. But here the minister is questioned about those, as though the minister had delivered that conversation themselves. So you're constantly having to react to, deal with, these very, very operational matters. As though, as Bevan [Nye Bevan, founder of the NHS] would have said – “the bedpan really was echoing from Tredegar”. So that's the constant difficulty here. It's very hard to get into concentrating on more systemic strategic type things. 

When I was health minister, there were a series of very difficult operational things that happened, in North Wales particularly. In a unit for elderly people with advanced mental health conditions and quality of care was clearly not what it should be, but it was a closed ward and in closed wards things go wrong because the outside world very rarely looks into what is going on.

So the thing I wanted to do the most and, succeeded to a small extent but not as much as I would have done, was to advance the cause of what we call ‘prudent healthcare’. Which was an approach to healthcare that was designed to try to minimise the enormous amount of wasteful activity that goes on in the health service and to avoid over medicalisation and to intervene only when you are certain that this is the right thing to do. And to deescalate the system – the system is escalating, you get on it and it shoves you ever more rapidly into the system itself. So prudent healthcare, which was aligned with a BMA [British Medical Association] campaign called ‘Too Much Medicine’, was my attempt to try and find a sort of strategic approach to dealing with the balance between supply and demand in the health service. But it was hard to find the ground that you could continue to develop that on, when you're constantly being dragged off it to deal with the latest difficulty in wherever that might be.

AP: I'd like to turn the clock forward then, you were promoted to finance secretary in 2016 and then six weeks or so later, we had the EU referendum and Wales and the whole UK voted for Brexit. What was it like to be in government and in cabinet in the immediate aftermath of the referendum result?

MD: Well, I think there's a palpable sense of shock. Because I don't think we had seen it coming until quite close to the end. It’s important to remember the conditions in which the referendum was held in Wales. I know that my predecessor, Carwyn Jones, had argued very strongly with David Cameron not to use that date because, we just had our elections at the beginning of May. People are exhausted by that. The run up to a Senedd election is hard work for everybody, and you've spent your time having to compete with your opponents, so the chance that you could come back together again and run an effective campaign, the unified campaign in favour of Wales remaining in the European Union, it's really below the watermark by the date of it all.

We undoubtedly, looking back, ran a very underpowered campaign. Had we known that the stakes were what they were, we would have, I'm sure, found the energy from somewhere to have done more and worked harder at it. But lots of people were running on empty at this stage and the organisation of it all is being done by people who've just spent the whole of their time trying to do something else that's a big event.

So my main recollection is one of shock. A very quick agreement around the cabinet table that we would not in Wales spend our time trying to redo the referendum itself. So there was a mantra that we repeated that what we were interested in was not the fact but the form of Brexit. The fact was decided. Much as we regretted it, there had been a referendum – that's the result. What we want to focus on is the form of it and to, I suppose to simplify it a lot, our position was that the referendum meant that the United Kingdom would have to withdraw from the political arrangements of the European Union, but that did not mean that we needed to withdraw from the economic arrangements. So we weren’t going to be part of the parliament, we weren’t going to be part of the council of ministers – all of this a great regret for many of us. But that did not mean that we were going to turn our back on Wales’s economic interests.

One of my colleagues in Plaid Cymru, Steffan Lewis, I remember saying on the floor “people in Wales may have voted to leave the European Union, but they didn't vote to take leave of their senses.” And so that was our position. David Davis, the then secretary of state for exiting the European Union [for the UK government], came here in July [2016] and I went to the meeting that he held with Carwyn and it was an extraordinary meeting really, because Carwyn was very serious about all of these things. And he had a very particular depth of knowledge about the Irish question, his family connections and things like that. The meeting proceeded in this way: Carwyn would pose, what I would regard as a very necessary but quite challenging, question and the secretary of state would probably say, “oh, well it will be all right. It'll be alright. It’ll be alright.” And that was how the meeting went really. 

So those are the very early days and then, Brexit undoubtedly is the most chaotic thing I've ever been involved in government. Because I was the Brexit minister I was up and down to London more often than I've ever been. I was going there probably twice a week to be involved in extraordinary sort of meetings and things. Being finance minister was my own best ministerial job – I enjoyed that role very much, but Brexit on top of it was…it was busy. But that was fine.

AP: As Brexit minister, you spoke already about how the cabinet had quickly agreed on its approach and what you wanted to achieve from the process. What was your strategy for trying to achieve those objectives?

MD: Well, the UK government set up a new Joint Ministerial Committee (a JMC) on European Negotiations [JMC-EN]. It had some very ambitious terms of reference – this this was to be the forum in which the way forward was to be discussed and agreed. So I think we played as full a part in the JMC-EN as we could have done. We attended every single meeting and tried to take it seriously as a forum for making this basic case that we are not here to argue against the result of the referendum. But we are here to say that there are ways in which we can leave the European Union, which will harm or will protect essential interests for Wales – and there are some very specific interests for Wales. We have the largest manufacturing component of our economy of any part of the United Kingdom. We have the largest agricultural component. We face the Irish Sea and the relationship with the island of Ireland is very important directly to us. So there were some very Welsh specific issues where depending on how the negotiations were concluded, would either help or harm those interests. So my aim always was to go in and explain those things, advocate for them. 

The frustration I always had was that the prime minister at the time, Mrs [Theresa] May, I think felt stuck. There was quite an identity of interest in some of these things. I felt that she too, wanted an economic relationship that was going to protect essential UK interests and so on. But, tactically, the way the UK government went about it always seemed to me to make that harder to achieve, rather than easier to achieve. The whole ‘red lines’ approach to negotiation was such a mistake from the very beginning. The Lancaster House speech that she made – “Brexit means Brexit”. All of this sort of stuff seemed to me to betray a sort of ‘winner takes all’ approach to the referendum. 52% of people have voted for it – they will get everything. 48% of people voted against it – they will get nothing. So I felt like a more even handed approach from the beginning, and more balance – this was a tightly fought campaign, we will honour the result, but there are clearly, important interests that nearly half the population here believes should need to be pursued and I'll be doing that – I think would have found a place in the House of Commons for her eventual package. Which we were not that unsupportive of. I think from the Welsh government point of view, considering the difficulties of the politics of it all, we went as close as we could to saying that this was a deal that we could live with.

AP: Were there elements of that intergovernmental relationship that worked well? Were there upsides of that process?

MD: Well, I would myself have commended the prime minister of the time for her willingness to be inventive in the way that she used the resources of government and the risks that, in some ways, she was prepared to run. So it was genuinely extraordinary, it seemed extraordinary at the time, that Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales were all members of a Conservative cabinet subcommittee chaired by the prime minister, with the chancellor and all the main players there, which was the no deal Brexit committee. 

So here you have an array of Conservative ministers and then there is myself, there is Mike Russell from Scotland and there's Máirtín Ó Muilleoir, the finance minister in Northern Ireland, sitting in the same room. And looking back, but even at the time I thought it, it's quite a constitutional innovation for that to happen. But I think the prime minister at the time had a better understanding of devolution and the need to embrace the different parts of the United Kingdom than some of her successors did, [and] I think that sense of being willing to flex the way things normally were to these extraordinary circumstances.

And when the JMC-EN settled into a rhythm under the chairing of David Lidington [minister for the Cabinet Office and chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, 2018–19], I felt it managed to do some useful things. And the JMC-Europe, which was always one of the most successful of the JMCs, continued throughout this period and continued again to do the job that it was expected to do of having the component parts of the United Kingdom round the table to inform the position that the UK government would take in its European Union discussions. And at different points. Scottish ministers and Welsh ministers have led for the UK in those discussions so that’s an example of where the system did work well.

AP: That is impressive that the machinery continued to function despite the difficult politics. In 2018, part way through the Brexit process, you became first minister. To what extent did you see your role as to provide continuity? Or were there things that you consciously sought to change about what the Welsh government had been doing?

MD: Well, I suppose the main reason why, in the end, I became a candidate to be Labour leader and the first minister, was because I thought I ought to put the experience that I had had over the whole period of devolution at the disposal of the Labour Party – if it wanted to use it. The Brexit experience was very important in that because we were still in the throes of it all and it was still having a very shaping influence over Wales’s future. We are absolutely now in the grips of austerity and I've been the finance minister, so I've grappled with all of that and I've had 10 years in the first minister's office, seeing how the first minister's office itself works. I felt like there was nobody else who had the access to the same range of experience, in what was going to be a very turbulent and challenging time. 

By then, Welsh Labour had won five elections in a row and every time you win an election, the hill does get a bit steeper to climb because, as we learned on 4 July, ‘change’ is a potent slogan in politics. And in Wales, change doesn't mean the Labour Party – does it? Because, in some ways, because we've been there from the beginning. So I also felt that there was an election coming and that one of the things that I have tried to be involved in since the beginning is crafting a political narrative for Labour in Wales that continues to cement the bond between the Labour Party and the people who we are lucky enough to have continued to vote for us. I felt I could offer something in that space as well, as we went into the [2021] election.

I didn't seek to change things fundamentally because I've been part of the government, you know, this is not a change of government. There were things that I wanted to emphasise. One of the things I’ve always felt strongly is that if you are to persuade people in Wales to go and vote Labour, you have to show that you are yourself a government of change. That you are not simply turning the handle or occupying the seats, that you have an agenda of policy propositions that you want to pursue. Part of the leadership election was to refresh the repertoire of ideas and to show that there was a prospectus there that would carry us through the rest of that term and into the term beyond. So it wasn't that I had huge ways in which I wanted to change the operation of government or the thrust of government. But there were some new ideas that were consistent with the sort of government we've been, but could show how we were ambitious to carry that into the future.

AP: And what stands out in that respect?

MD: Well, I'll give you just a slightly different example because it's the earliest example and it's the first big decision that fell to me, and that was the M4 relief road. So there is a problem at the M4 around Newport, there's no doubt about that. It was designed in an era not to take the traffic that it now has to manage and there had been a proposal to create a new six lane highway, south of Newport, that was argued would was relieve that problem. I don't think there's any doubt, and I think he would very happily say so, that had that decision landed on the desk of my predecessor [Carwyn Jones], he would have given the go ahead. All the conventional pressures were there to do that. 

In the end it didn’t materialise while Carwyn was still in government. So it landed on my desk instead. I took a very long time, you know, reading vast amount of stuff but in the end I came to the opposite conclusion – that this was not a solution for the 21st century. We had 70 years of believing that the way to deal with traffic was to build more roads and all they do is create more traffic, and the environmental damage that will be done in the process wasn't sustainable and it wasn't affordable and it wasn't consistent with the Well-being of Future Generations Act.

So I took a different decision which I think was a bit symbolic of the fact that we were going to be in a slightly more radical end of the political spectrum. And if I made any claim for the time that I was in government, it would be that we continued to occupy space in that more radical end of things. Consistent, in my view, with the need to persuade people in Wales that a Labour government is a government that does have reform at its heart, not just administration of the status quo.

AP: Were there other lessons that you took from having observed your predecessors so closely or indeed things that you tried to do differently?

MD: Well, I'm a strong advocate myself of what's called distributed leadership. I have strong antibodies to hierarchical ways of doing things, but in the first minister's office you are, in a way, the top bit of a hierarchy. So you have to fight hard not to just fall into that way of doing things. So yes, I would have changed a number of things to suit my own view of things. Two examples – one of the set pieces every week here is first minister’s questions which happen on a Tuesday. You have to prepare for it and I think the way the Carwyn did it was on a Monday to meet with the permanent secretary and the three directors general and you know, go through the questions with them and get everything. 

I've always been frustrated by the civil service’s wish to send you somebody who knows almost nothing more than you do about a subject but has been briefed by somebody who was briefed by somebody who was briefed by the person who actually was working on it. So I have had a different way from the very beginning. On a Monday I would meet – often virtually – with the people who had actually worked on the answer that I'd been given. And this is a very difficult thing in the in the civil service hierarchy because it is so desperately still stuck in that way of doing things. They found it very difficult for the first minister to speak to somebody who may be a ‘grade whatever it is’ and I couldn't care less, really. I wanted to speak to the person who knows the most about it, because they would be the most help to me. So you know, this was a fairly revolutionary way of doing things, in its own very small way, but it's how I did it all the way through. You get 12 questions, you may reach up to 10 of them and I would spend the hour talking with the person who I thought was closest to the to the issue. So that was a change and it's consistent with the distributed leadership approach. 

I tried, and up until Covid succeeded, in having cabinet meetings once a fortnight, and the intervening week we would have what was sometimes called a ‘discussion cabinet’. So a cabinet that wasn't on the usual ‘decisions have to be made about a consultation exercise’ or something. You know, the sort of papers that routinely come in front of cabinet. Very important papers, of course, necessary to the work of government – but normally the end of a process, not the beginning of a process. So the discussion cabinets were meant to be things where we looked at issues which were not on anybody's desk today, but you could see would be in 12 months’ or even 24 months’ time. 

I would have all ministers involved. Carwyn’s cabinet was only ever cabinet secretaries, of which there would be about eight, and then there would be four junior ministers, as they were called in those days. But the discussion cabinet I always wanted everybody to be there. And we always had people from outside to come as well.

I wouldn't chair them because I know perfectly well that even when you are trying distributed leadership, if the first minister takes a lead and says something, it shapes what other people will say. So my aim was to sit back, to listen. I would sometimes say things quite near the end, but I wanted to hear what other people thought. And these will be on issues, as I say, not of the absolute here and now but ideas that you could see needed to be grappled with.

AP: That's so interesting. So would each one have a specific theme and then you'd bring in external experts? 

MD: Yes and I’d canvas ideas for those amongst cabinet colleagues. For example, the shape of the school day and the school year was one that we did quite early on and had some people who had some more challenging thoughts about how you bring that into line with the way people live their lives in the 21st century. You can do these meetings without the pressure of having to make a decision, not forced with a deadline and a set of recommendations.

AP: So those wider ranging conversations you had would then inform the decisions you had to take later down the line. Is there a particular example that comes to mind?

MD: Well, the school day and school year is a good example. Because I still think it's important that we change the way in which the school day operates. We managed to find a tiny bit of money for a few pilots and things. To digress very briefly, I went to see one in my own constituency on the Ely estate where there are lots of families with lots of struggles. They extended the school day (that's what the money was for) and as the head teacher – a brilliant head teacher – said to me, “We are not using the extended school day to spend more time chanting the six times table. What we are offering these children is experiences that they will never have otherwise. In sports, in arts and culture and things like that”. And he said on the days when the extended school day was operating, i.e. when children were spending longer in school, the attendance figures went up. Not what you would think, would you? Asking children to spend even longer in school. You would think they'd avoid those days, but actually because there was something to look forward to more young people came to school that day. So you know, so there's lots of very good things to pursue from all of that. 

AP: Fascinating. I wanted to move on now to the pandemic period which dominated quite a lot of your first term as first minister. How did your role as first minister change? What was the impact on your working day and the kinds of decisions you had to take?

MD: Well, it's pretty profound really and it changes the way you work completely. I think it was four of my cabinet or my ministerial colleagues that were captured by the original shielding advice. They were 70 or over and therefore weren't meant to leave their own homes. I was very anxious at the beginning that we did not want to end up with a two-stream government in which some people felt they were involved and other people felt that they were removed from it, so we moved straight away to remote meetings.

The cabinet met every day at 9 o’clock in the morning. Sometimes just for half an hour, but partly just to make sure that everybody felt that they were part of what was going on. If there was an issue they were dealing with that other people needed to know about, then there was that half an hour clearance period in the morning when we could identify those things and make sure everybody felt that they were genuinely involved in it all.

So it upended the machinery of government completely. In the very early months, I would often be the only person in Cathays other than maybe the health minister, and very occasionally another minister. So you really are [far] from a way of working in which you see people all the time and you rely on just being able to walk down the corridor and talk to people. That's all gone. And it's a very strange experience. It's eerie. The building is empty. There are more people in fatigues [military uniform], there are more people in the army there than other people that you would see. So it's a very strange experience in that sort of way. 

Most of your day is focused on Covid itself. And progressively lots of my life becomes having to explain to ministerial colleagues why some of the things that we were very committed to doing, we're not going to be able to achieve. I chaired the legislation committee and I chaired the local government committee because these were the places where essentially the rationing took place, because there isn't time and there isn't resource to do everything that we would have done had Covid not been there. And yet these are things that people are very committed to and have spent a long time working on and, you know, really want to happen. So as well as dealing with the Covid issues itself, you are having to deal with the impact that it had on the ability of the government to achieve the other things that we wanted to achieve.

AP: What did that period and the crisis reveal about the strengths and weaknesses in the capacity of the Welsh government?

MD: I think it's much more on the positive side than the negative side. I thought it was just remarkable how quickly the ordinary everyday things of government managed to be sustained. We were lucky – we've always said this. We'd had a major upgrade of the physical infrastructure of the Welsh government in the December beforehand. So suddenly everybody has equipment that they can actually use for the way that we work most of the time. I mean, my experience of doing these things up until that point was that there was a video conference suite on the ground floor of this building. And I used to always say that it had a sign hung on the doors as you came in that said “well it was working perfectly yesterday”. Because that's what you were always told whenever you went and this was the one room in the building where this where this could happen. So we moved into an entirely different world and we moved into it incredibly rapidly.

People did extraordinary things, I think, in adapting. We forget now. For the Covid inquiry, I had to reread documents, obviously, but one of the things I re-read was the Senedd debate, which happened on the Tuesday after the Monday we went into lockdown. And the sense of fear is absolutely palpable – it rises off the page at you. All you know is that there is this awful disease that we know very little about – other than it's killing an awful lot of people – and it could be you. And despite all that, despite the real impact that this was having on people's lives, the Welsh government managed to reorganise itself in a completely new way. And I think to make the best, we were able to of the new demands.

So there are downsides, we didn't do everything right by any manner or means, and the burden fell very heavily on relatively few shoulders. But on the whole, I think the biggest conclusion is just how remarkably the system managed to move from 2000 people a day coming into Cathays Park to nobody practically coming in, and still government continues.

AP: Yeah it is easier to forget just how much life changed overnight and as you say the psychological aspect of it. 

We've talked a bit already about intergovernmental relations. During your time as first minister there were four UK prime ministers, what impact did those quite frequent changes of leadership at Westminster have on the Welsh government and what you were trying to achieve?

MD: I think I'd say myself that the number of changes is less significant than the changes in attitudes, beliefs and approaches that went with them.

The story of Welsh devolution is that from 1999–2019 we essentially worked with prime ministers of Labour and Conservative persuasions who had a basic respect for devolution. And that's what altered – not just the person who altered. We didn't have a lot to do with David Cameron here, really, we dealt mostly with the Liberal [Democrat] members of the coalition government because I guess at that end of the M4, they thought that that would be more acceptable to us – and probably was more acceptable to us. On the whole those would be people who are closer in sympathy to us. So we had dealings with Tory ministers of course, but they were the front line people we dealt with. We had much more to do with Danny Alexander [chief secretary to the Treasury, 2010–15], for example, than we would have with George Osborne [chancellor of the exchequer, 2010–16].

But nevertheless a respect for the basic structure of devolution remained. David Cameron came and addressed the Senedd and I think he was the only prime minister who had ever done that.

So you know, we don't agree with them. We're very much opposed to austerity and all of that, but it's not that it feels like there's an attack on devolution itself. 

I thought Theresa May genuinely understood that the United Kingdom was, as she said herself, a voluntary association of four nations. I've sometimes given the example that on the day that her first attempt to bring a Brexit bill before the House of Commons failed – and what a day that must have been for her, she was on her feet answering questions for six hours or something and then a pretty crushing defeat – I get a telephone call from her about 10 o’clock at night when she'd already spoken to Nicola Sturgeon. These are not long conversations but they are symbolic, really. She believed that on that day when she must have been utterly exhausted by it all, she still needed to touch base with the first ministers of other parts of the United Kingdom.

I remember thinking that day, I think this does just demonstrate (much as I disagree with so much of, you know, the way she went about things) a genuine respect for the contemporary nature of the United Kingdom. And all of that ended with Mr Johnson, who had a very different view of things. It's the view not the person that made that difference and that was even more so the case during the very brief interlude of his successor [Liz Truss] and then reverted more to what we would have seen before with Rishi Sunak. 

But by then, the Conservative government is in deep decline. It’s in its last faltering period when there's no energy, there's no capacity, to invest in these things. Although [Sunak’s] basic approach in terms of respect was more like what we were used to in the 2010–19 period.

AP: Whereas under Boris Johnson, was there a very clear, immediate change in the nature of the communication you had with Downing St?

MD: I think that he too, on the day that he became prime minister, phoned the first minister of Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland and phoned again immediately after the general election of 2019 – so some of the rituals aren’t gone completely. But this is a government that believes in muscular unionism, it believed that the thing that has gone wrong with the United Kingdom is devolution. That's what Johnson told his supporters and I think we can probably take him at his word. He would like the United Kingdom to be as it was in 1974. A unitary state outside the European Union and he just behaved as though it was, even though it demonstrably wasn't.

AP: Is it true that as reported at the time that, albeit it was a short period, Liz Truss didn't speak with you or Nicola Sturgeon?

MD: Not at all. I can recount the whole of my conversation with the then prime minister because she came to Llandaff Cathedral in the aftermath of the death of the Queen. There was a service there and she was already in the cathedral when I arrived, and she said to me, “Good morning, Mark” and I said “Welcome” – and there you have it. That's the entire script of my conversation with the prime minister doing the brief period of days that she was in Downing Street. 

But that was a very deliberate show of disrespect. Johnson didn't go out of his way to be disrespectful. I couldn’t say that. In the conversations that I did have with him, infrequent as they were, he was always friendly and they were very proper conversations. There just weren't enough of them and the underlying basis was not what it needed to be. But face-to-face and in conversation with him there was nothing improper about it at all. Liz Truss’ decision not to contact the first minister of Scotland or Wales was a deliberate act of disrespect. Which I think is pretty shocking.

AP: So moving on, throughout your time as first minister, Labour has been in some form of coalition or cooperation agreement – from your perspective what were the pros and cons of this, rather than the alternative of trying to govern as a minority administration?

MD: Well, I think we learnt very quickly that minority administration is a life of grief really. Labour won 28 seats in the first election here [in 1999], in a system in which the civil servants and others who constructed it believed that the challenge was to design an institution in which Labour would be perpetually in the majority, and therefore you had to find ways in which you could engage other parties in its continuation. So the many ways the rules were stacked against the government here in order to make up for the fact that the government will always be Labour. Then Labour turned out not to have even 30 seats and the system has never delivered more than 30 seats for Labour.

So I think there are two big lessons from the last 25 years as far as Westminster politics is concerned – one that the proportional systems work (because we've always had a proportional system here) and secondly that working with other parties is a strength and not a unfortunate aberration of the system. The meta-narrative in Westminster system is that the first past the post system simply gives you strong government and that any other system would be weaker than that, and if you do have to ever so occasionally work with some other party then that's a failure of the system. And I think we demonstrate exactly the opposite here. We demonstrate that it is possible to run a system in which the votes that people cast are broadly reflected in the number of seats the party gets. In a way that I think would have been unexpected here in 1999, what we've learned is that it is a strength to create a culture in which working with other parties is the norm and not the exception.

We've done it in many different ways and we've invented and reinvented. But at the heart of it is recognition that you have to find ways of collaborating with other parties who share certain things with you. I think we found a way to do it, which is that you've got to be specific and written down about what those areas are going to be. And you have to have a machinery – this is the bit that people don't see outside. You have to have, alongside the policy document, a document that sets out the working practices so when things go wrong and when there are difficult moments – as there will be – you know you can go to the documents and say “ah right, this is how we promised that we would work together”. So I think we've, by and large, learnt the rules.

AP: As far as the cooperation agreement with Plaid specifically, one of the big initiatives that that led to was the Independent Commission on the Constitutional Future of Wales. Do you have any reflections on that as a model of policy making? 

MD: Well, I think it in that specific instance it worked remarkably well. Again, I suppose the key thing you do in government is to get the right people to do the jobs that you need to be done. So the same vehicle might have not worked at all, it seems to me, if you hadn’t had the right people to do it for you. It wasn't just that because we, you know, thought a lot about it. But nevertheless, the combination of Rowan Williams and Laura McAllister leading it, I thought, made it the success that it that it was. It's not the vehicle by itself, it is the people populating the vehicle that make the difference.

But having struck lucky in getting the right people on it and a very good group of Commissioners and some very good people to challenge the Commissioners’ thinking. I think it went about its work in a way that gives us some broader lessons, which the government is still committed to taking forward, in terms of wider conversations with voices who otherwise find it a bit of a struggle to get heard in these debates. So as well as the specifics of the recommendations of the commission and the fact that it offers us a resource that will be very useful, not just in the here and now, but in 10 years’ time, and some of the ways in which it has dissected those different constitutional futures – the method of working is something which ought to be a bigger part of our future.

AP: There were specific recommendations for how the Welsh government should open up the policy process – is that something that you recognise that government could do better?

MD: Absolutely, I think the government has to find a way of responding to the changing nature of the times, doesn't it? Probably in the time that I've been around here, one of the very biggest changes in the very beginning – and it wasn't very like this for very long – but at the very beginning, most people who contacted you wrote to you. Actual letters with stamps. And somebody walked around the office everyday handing you what were called ‘travellers’, which were envelopes where the last person’s name was crossed out and you wrote your name in the next little box. And when you'd finished with the paper, you handed it back and it was taken to the next person.

Now people can contact you in so many different ways and everything that the Welsh government does is done electronically, even when you choose to print it for yourself. So it's completely different and we need to find ways of continuing to engage people in the work of government that is consistent with the ways they lead other parts of their lives.

I think that's what the commission practised itself and has given us some really good ideas for how we can do better in that area too.

AP: As for the higher profile recommendations that came from the commission relating to further devolution and wider constitutional reform, are you optimistic that now, with the change of government at Westminster, there may be some movement on some of that? Or indeed improvement in the wider approach to devolution?

MD: I'm optimistic there will be a different approach to devolution, and devolution is Labour's project, isn't it? It's the Labour Party that made it happen – without a Labour government we would never have had it. So it is firmly in Labour's history and therefore I do feel there will be a different basic attitude towards things. 

I think it's just a bit too early to be sure as to how much space the new government will find for devolution amongst everything else that it has to grapple with 14 years since the last day we had [a Labour government]. I have a bit of understanding for those voices that say “Look at all the things that we've got to put right”. Constitutional issues and devolution is amongst them, but it can't necessarily force its way to the front of the queue in the way devolution did for the Blair government, and that was after 17 years. So I would be prepared myself to make the argument that without much money – it's going to be a while until a Labour government is going to be able to reinvest in some of the things which we all know need reinvestment. 

One of the ways in which an incoming Labour government can demonstrate that it will be a reforming and a different government is to deal with some of the constitutional difficulties of the last 14 years and to use the Gordon Brown report [the 2022 report of the Commission on the UK's Future] as the basis for it. Now we know already that there are parts of the Gordon Brown report that are going to be seen – there’s going to be a council of the nations and the regions and the prime minister is going to chair it. There is going to be House of Lords reform, albeit in stages and with the smaller stages coming first. Some of the things that the commission here talked about in terms of devolution are going to happen here – such as responsibility for job centres. I know it makes seem very small, but actually it's a really important piece of the jigsaw for us. Wales has one of the highest proportions of the population of the United Kingdom who are outside the labour market not seeking work and we need to persuade more of those people that they could be back in the work place and job centres will help us to do that. So the incoming government already has a series of commitments in this area. Some of us are going to probably have to be a bit more patient than we would naturally want to be, to get some of the other things there jostling against everything else that that government is having to deal with.

AP: We were just speaking about the cooperation agreement with Plaid. Originally that was that was signed as a three-year cooperation agreement and it was due to run until November 2024. Were you surprised or disappointed that it ended so soon after you left office and six months or so earlier than planned?

MD: Disappointed? Yes. Surprised? Not necessarily. The big things that were in the cooperation agreement had largely been completed. I would myself have preferred that it did run its full course – even if the last six months of it were relatively quiet and where we were dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on things rather than grappling with some of the very big things we did in the beginning. Like second home arrangements and so on. 

It was a Plaid Cymru decision [to end the cooperation agreement]. It wasn't the decision of the Labour government. The Labour government would have willingly completed it, but there's a general election pending and that is going to make it more difficult. I feel like our Plaid Cymru colleagues decided that it was better to bring it to an orderly end when we were still in good order with one another, than to risk a six months when it would become more difficult and unravel and end in a disorderly way. So it’s not that there wasn't a sensible case for it. Myself, I think it would have been preferable to have brought it to an orderly end at the point that it was originally expected.

AP: It has meant that Labour is back to governing as a pure minority administration, which we talked about before being tricky. And clearly, your successor Vaughan Gething has faced and continues to face some quite serious political difficulties [NB. Gething resigned on 16 July, the day after this interview was conducted]. Do you have any advice that you would give him for how to manage and overcome those challenges?

MD: Well, I don't know that I do particularly. Governing without stability has never been easy here. We've had periods of instability, right in the very beginning and we had another period in 2005–06 where Labour started with the majority and lost it. These are never easy things to navigate. You just have to find that – and this is my own view – the political fault line that goes through the Senedd ought to be the one that has progressive parties of the centre left on one side and the Conservatives on the other. That's where the real faultline lies. Things start to go wrong, from a Labour perspective, when that line gets blurred and opposition parties begin to work more closely together against a Labour government. And there are many, many political forces that drive parties in that direction. Our job has always been trying to stop that from happening and to work alongside other progressive parties to demonstrate that the three-quarters of the Welsh population that votes for parties that describe themselves as being on the left of the centre of politics deserve to have political results in the Senedd that reflect that 75%. 

We're going to have to work hard in the remaining part of this Senedd to sustain that basic sense that, while we may no longer be in a formal arrangement together, there is a greater identity of interest between parties in this part of the spectrum. And that's going to be that's going to need a lot of talking and a lot of work and I would still be myself (if I was around doing this) thinking let's get to the end of the term. And in the autumn I would be going back to other parties and saying, ‘we're not going to have a cooperation agreement with them, but we still need some mechanism, some forum, in which we can meet together regularly’. And, if it were me, I'd be perfectly happy to use that to review the progress of policies that were agreed in the cooperation agreement, to continue to share information. Where there are new things that we need to do, where we can find an agreed way of doing it, even if they're ad hoc and individual now rather than as part of a programme, let's continue to do that. Because in that way you build up confidence between progressive parties that they can continue to make the Senedd work to the benefit of Welsh people.

When we lost seats at the election in 2007, Labour was on 26 seats, the lowest we've ever been. On the Friday after the election, I walked into Cathays Park with Rhodri Morgan, the then first minister, and he said to me “I want to speak to Helen Clark in New Zealand” because New Zealand's the only other parliament that has the same voting system as we do and she'd run a Labour administration without ever having a majority for quite a long period of time. So indeed – miraculously considering we were in a completely different time zone – within a couple of hours Helen Clark was on the phone and she said to him: “Rhodri, if you want to stay in government, you've got to get out on the dance floor and dance”. What she meant was that you can't afford to wait for them to come to you. If you want to you've got to get out there and you've got to find the dance partner. And in a way, I've always remembered that as good advice. 

For the rest of this term, for Labour to be able to continue to govern, we’ve got to make the running, we’ve got to show our ambition for the future and we’ve got to go out and talk to those other parties who share a broad progressive outlook here in Wales. No point in standing back and waiting for them to talk to us. By doing that, hopefully, you sustain those conversations that allow you to continue to be in government, rather than just in office.

Millie Mitchell (MM): As a final question, what advice would you give to ministers coming into office for the first time about how to be effective in their role?

MD: Ministers coming in for the first time: there are loads of things that I think you need to help them with. You have to explain to people that they are going to have to do some pretty quick and rapid work just in absorbing all the information that they're going to need from now on. So there's a period of intense hard work in front of any new minister, just in becoming familiar enough with the topic to be able to do the second thing they have to do that is to always to ask questions. 

I think where things go wrong ministerially is when ministers don't probe enough and ask enough questions about the advice that comes across their desk. So I've often said to people completely new to it: when you've read the piece of advice you get, what you should ask yourself is not “what am I being told here?”, but “what am I not being told here?” Because you know the advice will be a process of selection, there will have been many iterations of it and some things will have been taken out of it as it goes along. So what I think is a good minister, is a questioning minister. A minister who is prepared to challenge some of the advice that they get, not in an aggressive way at all, but just to show that, you know, they are not going to rely entirely on what is put in front of them.

If you think about the post office scandal as it's emerged, one of the real themes of it is successive ministers not being prepared to question the assurances that they were always being given. So a good minister is a questioning minister, that's the second thing that I would say to anybody coming in. 

And then the third thing I would say to them is be bold. You will not be a minister forever. In fact, you'll probably be a minister for not that long in the political world. So while you have the opportunity to do the things that you think you've been elected to do, that you think will make the biggest difference, be prepared to lean on the powers and the advice you have. Because the system will do the opposite for you. The system will always tend to advise you to take a bit more time – “If I was you minister…” or “I wouldn't go quite as far as that if I was you”, “I'm sure if we did something slightly less challenging that would get you off to a better start”. You know the tendency of the system will be to pull you back to the sort of, as the advisers would see it, safer ground, and your job as a minister is to push in the opposite direction and use the chance while it comes your way.