Working on a post

On the creation of the Labour-Plaid coalition in Wales

One of the sections of this Substack draws together material, particularly Welsh Government Cabinet Minutes, which I am using to write a history of the making of the Welsh Government, from the referendum in 1997 to 2024. So far in that story I have got to the 2007 election.

I am currently working on a longish post which was originally intended to look at the post-election Cabinet meetings in 2007 and the build-up to the coalition.

However, I realised this week that I have a lot of unpublished diary materials which explore the creation of the coalition from the perspective of a back-bencher, and then Deputy Minister, initially opposed to an agreement with Plaid. I was not centrally involved in the negotiations, but my diary records the tensions at play in the Labour Group in the Assembly, in my constituency party, and amongst MPs at Westminster, and my changing perceptions of what was politically possible in the light of other parties’ developing positions.

The material is quite raw, in that I do not intend to link the post to much of the published records that we already have on the forming of the coalition. I am also constrained in what I can write about the ministerial side, as to include that would need formal approval from the Welsh Government. So ministerial stuff, other than that already approved and published, is out. But I am free to publish material about the political party discussions and constituency pressures, and interactions with the media. I will probably also include material from the published Welsh Government Cabinet Minutes from May to July 2007.

But some of the names will be redacted or glossed, to protect the guilty….