Morning Call: The pain of Gething elected

Wales has a new First Minister.

Freddie

Good morning. Welsh Labour has a new leader: Vaughan Gething. He will succeed Mark Drakeford as the Welsh first minister on Wednesday. But what problems await him?

Then, George has got hold of some slides that suggest Sadiq Khan could lose the London mayoral election in May. Full details below. And Ben looks at Andrew Tate’s popularity.

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There are many problems for Gething to deal with when he is sworn in as Welsh first minister later this week. The first is to bring the Welsh Labour Party together after a closely fought and bitter leadership election campaign. Gething does not have the luxury of a resounding mandate: he got 51.7 per cent, while his opponent Jeremy Miles got 48.3 per cent. There are still grumbles around a £200,000 donation Gething received from a company led by a man convicted of environmental offences. Accusations of a union “stitch-up” by Miles injected a level of distrust into the contest. Little wonder that the mood within the party is not one of rampant celebration.

Then there are the policy issues. Polling still suggests that the introduction of a 20mph speed limit on restricted roads across the country is unpopular. Welsh farmers are furious about the imposition of new environmental regulations. To make matters worse, the shadow environment secretary Steve Reed recently told me that Welsh Labour must “amend their proposals”. The poor state of the Welsh NHS – which accounts for half of the government’s spending – is being exploited by the Conservatives to undermine Labour’s claim to be the party of the health service. Another complicating factor will be renegotiating the policy agreement with Plaid Cymru that enables Labour to pass legislation in the Senedd. Plaid Cymru’s leader Rhun ap Iorwerth has called on Gething to hand back the controversial donation.

Looming above all that is the general election. Gething will lead Welsh Labour’s campaign to make Keir Starmer prime minister – a central theme in his acceptance speech on Saturday. This underscores how key the relationship between Gething and the national party will be. Gething does not represent a radical departure from Mark Drakeford, not least because he has been in the Welsh cabinet since 2016. But he did support Starmer for the Labour leadership, while Drakeford backed Jeremy Corbyn as far back as 2015. A UK Labour government may make it harder for Cardiff to blame Westminster over insufficient funds. It will be interesting to see whether Gething’s Welsh Labour becomes a focal point for criticism of the national party’s fiscal restraint.

But that’s way down the line. First, Gething must appoint his cabinet.

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Freddie’s picks – extended edition.

Gary Tinker thought he had been paying tax until HMRC sent him a bill for £300,000. Fascinating report from Will on Mr Tinker vs the Taxman.

Ellen speaks to Suzie Miller, the playwright behind Prima Facie, in which Jodie Comer plays a lawyer fights back against sexual assault.

Can the energy transition be left to the market? No, argues Adrienne Buller.

Jason has written an interesting piece on whether Rachel Reeves will create a new economic consensus, or simply manage decline (Sunday Times)

Sam Freedman argues that immigrants have integrated well into British society because of education (Comment is Freed, Substack).

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Could Sadiq Khan lose?

George

One of Sadiq Khan’s proudest boasts is that he has never lost an election. “I’m a winner, I never lose,” he told his team when he entered the race to become Labour’s London mayoral candidate in 2015, recounting how he had won every contest he had fought since standing to be a school class rep at the age of 11.

But as Khan seeks an unprecedented third term as mayor he is haunted by the spectre of defeat. He and his team privately fear that the London election on 2 May will be far closer than most believe – a message that Khan will reaffirm at his campaign launch with Keir Starmer today.

Photo by Seth Wenig/AP Photo

At first this resembles classic expectation management – the ritual that all parties indulge in with the aim of motivating turnout and ensuring favourable coverage of the eventual result. A YouGov poll last month put Khan 25 points ahead of his Conservative rival Susan Hall. But the mayor’s aides insist that a “perfect storm” of factors could oust him from City Hall.

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