If Andy Burnham does nothing else, he has already done Wales a favour by sacking Jo Stevens as Welsh Secretary. She was the 11th Secretary of State for Wales appointed by a UK Labour Prime Minister, and the ninth different person (two of them had two separate periods in the post). An assessment of all nine can be read here. Now Stevens has gone it is possible to compare her performance with that of the other eight. From best to worst, this is how I rank them;
KEY:
Name – period in office – constituency
1 Ron Davies 1997-98 Caerffili
2 Jim Griffiths 1964-66 Llanelli
3 Peter Hain 2002-08 & 2009-10 Neath
4 John Morris 1974-79 Aberafan
5 Cledwyn Hughes 1966-68 Ynys Môn
6 Paul Murphy 1999-2002 & 2008-09 Torfaen
7 Alun Michael 1998-99 Cardiff South & Penarth
8 Jo Stevens 2024-26 Cardiff East
9 George Thomas 1968-70 Cardiff West
If it wasn’t for the presence of a thieving, lying, cruel, hypocritical, fanatically Cymruphobic, predatory sexual exploiter who ended up as a foaming-at-the-mouth, far-right zealot, Stevens would be the worst of all. Burnham seems to have grasped what Starmer couldn’t/wouldn’t: it is illogical, destructive and contemptuously insulting to give the job to a self-defined “Unionist” (translation: an anti-devolution rightwing British Nationalist). The Senedd election in May, in which Labour had its worst ever result in Wales, was the deserved outcome. Starmer didn’t care, but it appears that Burnham might.
His appointment of Aberafan Maesteg MP Stephen Kinnock to replace Stevens can only be an improvement on Madam No. The bar is set very low, so expectations are not high. But it would be a refreshing change if Kinnock simply rejected the approach inflicted on Wales by the last five incumbents (Tories Cairns, Hart, Buckland & Davies plus Stevens) – the approach that twisted the very concept of a Welsh Secretary, from giving Wales an advocate around the cabinet table in London into giving the UK an openly hostile malicious meddler in Welsh affairs.
However, Kinnock had barely begun before he was undermining Burnham’s supposed radicalism and trotting out the UK Labour Party’s threadbare and nonsensical refusal to bring Wales into line with Scotland and Northern Ireland by devolving policing, justice, rail and the Crown Estate. “I am not entirely convinced”, he intoned like a colonial governor, as if his opinion rather than the consensus in Wales is what matters. So those low expectations have sunk even further already. Silly me, I had almost forgotten the ancient maxim about “the sins of the father”…