Vaughan Gething, foisted on Wales by a handful of Labour Party members, has only been First Minister for a few weeks but he has already established himself as easily the worst in the 25-year history of our fledgling Welsh democracy. His arrogance, ignorance, smug self-regard, cavalier complacency, hollow posturing and reactionary low populism straight from the Tory textbook make him patently unfit for the job.

Examples of his alarming unsuitability are coming thick and fast. There is the scandalous £200,000 donation he accepted from a convicted criminal who had dumped toxic sludge on the protected Gwent Levels. Gething contemptuously refuses to explain why and for what purposes he was given this amount of money, dismissively brushes aside any criticism of it and prefers to dodge accountability by hiding behind evasive management-speak rather than actually addressing the genuine concern, incomprehension and distress his unprecedented monetisation of Welsh politics has caused across Wales. Meanwhile, it is emerging that the company owned by his generous benefactor David Neal owes £400,000 in loans from the Development Bank of Wales (DBW), which is a branch of the Welsh government – loans made when Vaughan Gething was Economy Minister and responsible for DBW! So, in effect, his narrow victory over Jeremy Miles was paid for by a raid on scarce public funds overseen by himself. This sort of brazen corruption is routine in Westminster but hitherto quite unknown in Welsh political life. Is this the direction Vaughan Gething intends to take Wales, a sordid mini-version of the foul cesspit of UK politics?

Then there are the peculiarly inappropriate remarks he made in his first speech to the Senedd. Putting to one side the deluge of vacuous waffle awash with abstract nouns and happy-clappy platitudes and entirely devoid of a single tangible policy, what was really distasteful was his repeated emphasis on his wholly irrelevant skin pigmentation and utterly inconsequential racial heredity. It is obviously ‘good’ for Wales to have a black leader, as it would be ‘good’ to have a woman leader, a gay leader, a disabled leader, a ginger-haired leader or a leader with size 10 feet – so long as that person has the requisite qualities. But, in and of itself, being black indicates absolutely nothing. Here two words will suffice: Kwasi Kwarteng. Alarmingly, Gething’s approach indicates he is an adherent of the USA-imported identity politics that have been such a boost to the far-right over the last decade or so. Following the dead-end path taken by American neo-liberalism means he has abandoned the only ‘identity politics’ that matter: class identity. The hyper-individualised obsession with identity has been cynically introduced to ignore inequality, injustice and exploitation and ditch the age-old struggle between capital and labour, a struggle that has never been more urgent. Identity politics has proved a pitifully inadequate substitute for socialism. To add insult to injury, having hung an uninformative identitarian lanyard around his neck, congratulated himself on his heroic overcoming of prejudice against the odds and ludicrously grabbed the high moral ground of victim status, Gething then had the impertinence to sermonise about “disunity” and “the forces of division”.

The few lines he devoted to Wales started well. There were signs of both political passion and grasp of the paramount Welsh issue when he said: “In recent years we have seen unprecedented hostility towards democratic Welsh devolution from a UK government determined to undermine, frustrate and bypass the Welsh government and this Senedd. As well as leaving Wales with less say over less money, it is deeply corrosive, wasteful and undemocratic”. But this understanding that Wales’ main problem is being shackled to the appalling UK was immediately ruined by “I relish the opportunity to co-operate with a new UK government that invests in partnership and in Wales’ future”. So, his strategy is to sit tight, keep his fingers crossed, wait for Tory appeaser Keir Starmer to form a Labour government in London – and then things can only get better…excuse me while I pick my jaw up from the floor…

To put the tin lid on his confused contradictions and banal wishful thinking, the only First Minister unable to speak Welsh then chose to unnecessarily brandish his Welsh credentials in the most cringeworthy way possible by sharing with us the revelation that his full name is “Humphrey Vaughan ap David Gething”. With that box ticked, in the next breath he snidely sniped at “the fruitless search for a past that never was” – precisely the sort of thing Vladimir Putin says about Ukraine, as well as a regurgitation of the blindly ahistorical bigotry that usually comes from British Nationalist imperialists who want Wales eradicated.

Moving on to Gething’s cabinet, which unsurprisingly lurches rightwards, the most telling change is the return of Ken Skates in a new post called “Cabinet Secretary for North (sic) Wales and Transport”. Quite apart from the fact that there is no such place as ‘North Wales’ (or ‘South’, ‘West’ and ‘Mid’ for that matter), it is appalling that the First Minister is dancing to the tune of the colonised British bootlickers who cannot bring themselves to treat Wales as a single entity and insist on a nonsensical, imaginary partition, the better to deny, dilute, invalidate and undermine our nationhood. It ought to go without saying that every member of the cabinet must automatically represent and be concerned with all of our small country, but instead Gething has persisted with Mark Drakeford’s misguided introduction of a mock-geographical division to Welsh governance, which seems to have no purpose other than to pander to the nasty prejudices and unreconstructed Cymruphobia of the lumpen oafs who read the ‘Welsh’ rags owned by Reach plc in London like the South Wales Echo and the Daily Post.

Skates himself, faced with the many daunting challenges of the transport portfolio, immediately showed where his priorities lie: watering down the 20mph limit in built-up areas introduced only last year because that’s what a mass, co-ordinated distortion of the Welsh petition system organised by rightwing wreckers demanded (petition signatories are not double-checked in Cardiff Bay, you just need a Welsh post-code, readily obtainable online, and an email address). Further backsliding on issues that aggravate the Tory media (i.e. anything remotely ‘green’ that needs to be carefully explained and patiently justified) seems certain. Populism, the politics of telling people what they want to hear, is always the soft-option for demagogues, cowards and scoundrels.

Another very troubling aspect of Vaughan Gething’s early days as First Minister is his prioritising of the UK over Wales. Without finding time for a cabinet meeting or making a start on a mountain of pressing issues, he has preferred to regularly dash off to London to toady with Keir Starmer and to preen self-importantly doing the rounds of British TV interviews. His semi-detached attitude to Wales sends the message loud and clear that his top priority is to establish himself as a leading figure in the UK Labour Party and that being First Minister is of secondary importance and merely a springboard for his ambitions. He is already being characterised as “Keir Starmer’s man in Wales” – a humiliating designation that both grossly overrates the UK and belittles Wales while calling into question his motives. The only previous First Minister to treat Wales like this was Alun Michael, imposed on Wales by Tony Blair, and he barely lasted a year before being toppled by a vote of no confidence. The question already arising is whether today’s Welsh Labour Party has the principles and the guts to repeat the trick 24 years later.

Perhaps the most shocking thing of all has been Gething’s reaction to the outrageous statement by Jane Richardson, the chief executive of Museum Wales, that the Museum is going to cut 90 jobs and the National Museum in Cardiff may have to close following a £3 million budget reduction (a consequence of the UK government’s £700 million cut in the annual Welsh budget last year and £2 billion cut in real terms across these 14 years of Tory rule). Apparently the building is crumbling and taking in water and the entire electrical system needs renovation. There are many aspects of Richardson’s statement that should be interrogated: why has this degeneration of a Grade I Listed building been allowed to happen; why does Cardiff always seem incapable of looking after its built heritage but is all too ready to facilitate another hideous tower block costing millions at the behest of corporate speculators; why can poverty-stricken me manage to fund the complete rehabilitation and rewiring of a tumbledown Victorian terraced house a mile down the road from the Museum that is 50 years older than it and not built of Portland Stone and marble; why did the Museum’s directors and trustees decide last year that it needed a chief executive on a fat salary when it had got by without one since opening in 1927; and why does Richardson, who declares her “strategic direction” to be “inspiration, ambition, creativity”, think it is within her remit to propose the erasure of a precious, treasured Welsh institution vital to the preservation of Welsh consciousness, Welsh history and the never-ending battle for Welsh actualisation.

I could go on, but I want to concentrate on Mr Gething’s atrocious response to such an upsetting proposal, a proposal that has caused deep anxiety and anguish to every sentient Welsh person. He reacted to what would be the equivalent of, say, France closing the Louvre with apathetic, bland indifference, saying that the NHS was the priority as if culture and health were mutually exclusive and as if this was just an accounting exercise determined by market forces. This barbaric, destructive and spectacularly stupid response to what is an existential Welsh crisis of the highest order is reason enough on its own for this man to be evicted from office. A day later the new Culture & Social Justice Secretary Lesley Griffiths made some reassuring noises about the Museum’s future, but the damage had been done: there should be no no way back for Vaughan Gething. Plaid Cymru can make a start by ending the ‘co-operation’ agreement with Labour forthwith and then working with decent Labour MSs and the other parties to bring Gething’s grotesque governance to a prompt and ignominious end.