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Carwyn Jones was crying for Labour’s slow, horrible death
removed: Carwyn Jones was crying for Labour’s slow, horrible death
(1 day later)
Welsh assembly leaders do not go gentle into that good night, as Dylan Thomas very nearly wrote, but sob, sob against the dying of the light. The light may not yet be gone for Carwyn Jones, Labour leader in the assembly, but it has certainly dimmed, and suddenly: Cardiff officials appear uncertain how to resolve the deadlock that arose when the election of a new first minister produced a dead heat between Jones and Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood. If party talks fail, there may even have to be a new Welsh assembly election.
• This article was taken down on 13 May 2016 because it was based on the mistaken premise that Carwyn Jones broke down in tears during a meeting of the Welsh assembly. The image published with the article, taken from a video of proceedings in the assembly, showed Jones holding a handkerchief up to his eyes. However, in the video itself it was clear that he was not crying, and we have since been informed that he was rubbing his eyes because of a medical condition.
In the shock of his unexpected failure to be re-elected by the Welsh assembly as first minister (and in spite of Labour still being the biggest party), Jones was photographed showing an emotion most modern politicians would do anything rather than reveal. He put his head in his hands and wept. The civilised setting of the curved wooden desks, each with its silver computer terminal, inside Richard Rogers’ temple to modern democracy that is the Senedd building on Cardiff Bay, powerfully frames his anguish. Jones hunches down in his dark suit jacket as if trying to vanish behind his workstation. His hair, the same colour as the metal screen casing, is all we can see of his features, for his face is buried in a huge hankie. There is no ambiguity about what we are seeing. Jones is crying his eyes out.
We say we want politicians to be more honest and authentic, yet this display of pure feeling seemed shocking
Tears are much rarer than they should be in politics. We say we want politicians to be more honest and authentic, yet this display of pure feeling seems shocking and outrageous in a political culture dominated by stoical masculinist values. In Westminster, the game of rough and tumble demands cruel wit and scathing ripostes, not girly crying. A statue of a suffragette outside the Houses of Parliament is likely to do a lot less for feminism than a widening of the emotional spectrum permitted in professional politics might – by which I do not mean that women cry a lot, but that men are schooled to conceal emotion. The result? A Tory government of coldblooded boy-men whose emotions were so firmly disciplined out of them at Eton and Harrow that they no longer know the difference between real and fake anger. They berated Sadiq Khan as an extremist in the exact same tones they use on actual extremists – thus abolishing not only decency, but meaning itself.
The tears of Jones are the salt water that could go some way to washing away the emotional deadness of our politics. Wales is showing England how to be human. The stiff upper lip always was an English thing: Welsh manners are more passionate. This is not simply a national stereotype. The arguments and tearful reconciliations, yelling and embraces of my own family history tell me that. So does the belief I grew up with in poetry and oratory as natural vehicles of expression. For that matter, so does the Welsh radical tradition in politics, from the rhetoric of David Lloyd George, to the fire of Aneurin Bevan, to the courage of Neil Kinnock.
And here we must go beyond appearances, to the heart of Jones’s sorrow. For surely he is not only weeping for himself. To misquote another Dylan – something is happening here and you know what it is, don’t you, Mr Jones.
Labour only looks like it is “holding on” from a narrow metropolitan perspective. What happened in Wales is yet another potential nightmare scenario for it as a British party: the prospect of Plaid Cymru playing the same ruthless games that have humiliated Labour in Scotland. Wood has certainly shown colossal chutzpah: Plaid Cymru is very much a minority party in Wales, yet it has acted with the self-righteousness of a “national” movement, the same sublime insular cockiness that has propelled the SNP to such spectacular success. Why not work with Ukip if it trashes those clumsy Labour bores, those red-tied losers?
A few more seats and Labour would not have to face this attack in Wales – but it did not win enough seats in the election that Jeremy Corbyn professed to be so satisfied with, so it’s vulnerable to chicanery. I feel like crying too, and not just about the Welsh assembly. Jones is only weeping the tears that Labour’s leaders, candidates, members and us loyal voters will weep before close of day. Political parties die from the extremities inward. Scotland has gone. Is Wales going? Then again, these are not extremities. They are the heartlands. Jones is crying for the Labour party’s slow and horrible death.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
