It is impossible to think about Vaughan Gething’s victory in the Welsh Labour leadership election without reference to the recent news about a Tory donor’s vicious racist rant against Westminster’s first Black female MP, Diane Abbott. Gething won the election on Saturday with 51.7% of the vote. When he succeeds Mark Drakeford as Wales’s first minister following a vote in the Senedd later this week, Gething will become the first Black head of government in the whole of Europe. This alone is cause to celebrate.
Yet Gething’s narrow victory over his opponent, Jeremy Miles, has caused deep unease within his own party. It was secured through a ruthless combination of old Labour-style backroom machinations and New Labour-style willingness to accept a donation from a source many party members regard as incompatible with their core values. All six of the largest trade unions endorsed Gething on the basis of committee votes. Unite’s nomination followed a bizarre, last-minute swerve, when officials recalled a previously obscure rule that meant only Gething was eligible for their support. The unions that supported Gething poured significant resources into persuading members to vote for their man in the leadership election.
There is also the matter of that donation. Gething’s campaign received £200,000 from a company run by a businessman who has twice been convicted of environmental offences. This may not sound like a lot of money, but to put this in context the Electoral Commission reported that Welsh Labour spent a total of £500,566 on its successful 2021 devolved election campaign. Not only had the businessman in charge of the company broken the law; in 2016, Gething asked Natural Resources Wales (NRW) to ease restrictions on a firm run by that same businessman. (Gething denied this was lobbying: “Eight years ago I wrote to NRW as a constituency member, it is not lobbying – lobbying is a loaded word, as we know,” he told the BBC.)
Despite the massive imbalance in resources available to the two candidates, Gething won only the narrowest of victories. Many regarded the result as an illegitimate “stitch-up”: one Labour MP told the BBC that Gething now had “questions he needs to answer”. Another Labour source said: “Everyone is furious. There is a real sense of anger about this.” Gething will struggle to heal these wounds, and the manner of his victory has also placed Welsh Labour – the democratic world’s most successful electoral force – in a difficult position in the run-up to the next Senedd election in May 2026. In Wales’s first devolved election, held in 1999, Welsh Labour was humbled when public anger about the way another Labour leader, Alun Michael, had been installed led to an unprecedented surge in support for Plaid Cymru. Today, it seems as though the Labour party has forgotten the dangers of taking the Welsh electorate for granted.
Throughout all of this, Gething has been at pains to point out that he had not broken any of the Labour party’s own election rules. This is true, but it is also the case that the credibility of Labour’s procedures has been another casualty of his campaign. Having won a victory, if not a mandate, Gething now faces two very significant challenges. The first is to secure losers’ consent within Welsh Labour ranks. This will not be straightforward. A significant majority of the members of Labour’s Senedd group supported Jeremy Miles, while a number of Gething’s supporters have been waiting for many years for government posts and now expect their reward. Constructing a stable and effective cabinet will be difficult. Dealing with this will require levels of tact and humility.
The Welsh electorate will likely pose an even bigger challenge – not in the UK general election, when the Tories will struggle to retain any Welsh seats, but in the next Senedd election. By then, Labour will have led the Welsh government for 27 years. Once Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are installed in Downing Street, it will no longer be possible to blame London for Wales’s problems. If people don’t feel that the Welsh Labour leader has legitimacy, then the task facing Gething and his party will be even more difficult.
Richard Wyn Jones is director of the Wales Governance Centre and dean of public affairs at Cardiff University
• This article was amended on 18 March 2024. Jeremy Miles was supported by a significant majority of the members of Labour’s Senedd group, not a significant minority as an earlier version said.
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