ANDREW PIERCE: Mark Drakeford – The lockdown zealot who leaves Wales in an abysmal state as he steps down as First Minister
Last year, Sir Keir Starmer described Mark Drakeford’s administration in Wales as a ‘blueprint for what Labour can do across the UK’.
Countless others maintain that Drakeford – a sanctimonious former academic who assumed his role as First Minister in 2018 – is the embodiment of everything wrong with devolution.
It was his micro-management of the Covid-19 lockdowns that earned him the sobriquet Kim Jong-Drakeford.
The teetotal leader imposed his own abstemious predilections on the principality, with draconian restrictions on the sale of alcohol and by insisting pubs close by 6pm.
Supermarkets were allowed to stay open but banned from selling non-essential items, creating the ludicrous spectacle of Tesco and Sainsbury’s sealing off aisles selling homeware and decorations, toys, phones, clothes and games.
Last year, Sir Keir Starmer (right) described Mark Drakeford’s (left) administration in Wales as a ‘blueprint for what Labour can do across the UK’
The teetotal leader imposed his own abstemious predilections on the principality, with draconian restrictions on the sale of alcohol and by insisting pubs close by 6pm
His lockdown zealotry came to a head with the bizarre revelation that he moved out of his family home into his garden shed to avoid potentially spreading the virus.
But it’s his record on education and health care for which he deserves the harshest criticism. Wales has consistently ranked lowest in the UK in reading, maths and science.
While all other UK nations had better results than the international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average, Wales was more than 3 per cent below it. Nor is there much prospect of any swift improvement.
Teacher vacancies rose from 1,100 in November 2020 to 2,300 in November 2022.
READ MORE: Did Keir Starmer squeeze out Mark Drakeford as First Minister of Wales for damaging Labour?
On health, the record seems even more dismal. The overall number waiting for NHS treatment in Wales is 761,111, almost one quarter of the country’s population.
Welsh politicians have been accused by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine of seriously under-reporting waiting times in A&E departments for an astonishing ten years, a charge the Labour administration denies.
But there is no denying the stark warning in the summer from Welsh GPs that they are now unable to provide safe, quality care to patients because of their ‘excessive workload’.
In the summer, Dr Gareth Oelmann, the chairman of the British Medical Association Cymru Wales, issued a ‘final plea’ to those in power to listen to GPs’ ‘grave concerns and help surgeries pull back from the brink’.
The hospitals are no better. Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, which runs 20 hospitals and coordinates the work of 96 GP practices and 147 pharmacies across six counties, has for six of the past eight years been in ‘special measures’.
At one point it was paying a ‘cost-saving’ consultant £2,000 a day for nine months, in a deal that allowed him to work from his holiday villa in Marbella.
His lockdown zealotry came to a head with the bizarre revelation that he moved out of his family home into his garden shed to avoid potentially spreading the virus
Last month Drakeford defended his embattled regime on the grounds ‘there simply isn’t money to do all the things we would like to do’.
Yet his roll-out of the hated 20mph speed limit in residential and urban areas throughout Wales has cost the principality £40million.
In August he admitted there was a £900million black hole in the principality’s £20billion budget which was set in 2021.
He blamed high inflation – only for the respected IFS think tank to say the impact of inflation on the budget was ‘probably not as much as £900million’.
Despite spending cuts, the woeful leader is pressing ahead with plans for 36 more Senedd members at a cost of £120million.
Drakeford goes in March but one Tory source told me: ‘His record is so abysmal he should go now and spend more time in his garden shed.’
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