Find out moreMark Drakeford says it was "extraordinary" Prime Minister Boris Johnson deliberately did not meet devolved leaders regularly in early 2020
A total of 10,271 people in Wales have died due to Covid - with a further 2,299 deaths listing Covid as a contributing factorBBC News We've heard a Drakeford accusation that Boris Johnson put politics before practicalities, concerns about a lack of regular top-level meetings and UK minister Michael Gove described as a"centre-forward" without any support from his team mates - or manager Johnson.
But he concedes"there is a plausible case that the signal should have been read earlier, and we should have moved what we were doing earlier in the year". Drakeford says in the"very early days" he wasn’t concerned by this, because"it did not occur to me that there was a particularly Welsh angle in what was a global phenomenon".
"I definitely don't think that the evidence suggests to me that decisions made in London would have been better decisions as far as Wales is concerned. Drakeford references a message sent by the UK government's health Minister, Matt Hancock, to Michael Gove on 30 May 2020 - more than two months after the first lockdown was announced - in which he said public health was not a devolved matter.
Tom Poole KC puts to Drakeford his own absence from the first three Cobra meetings indicated a similar lack of serious approach being taken in Wales. He says:"The difficulty was, in the early days, with frankly, very little else to do, the secretary of state filled his days by writing letters to me asking about the Welsh government's responsibilities."
In written evidence to the Covid-19 inquiry, Kirsty Williams says she drafted a letter offering her resignation days after “unfair” A-level results were published.Williams says the first minister and others convinced her to carry on. Drakeford describes Gove as a"a skilful centre forward without a team lined up behind him and where the manager was largely absent".
He adds he was aware of"anxieties in the UK government" about the"leaking" of details from these meetings to the press allegedly by Nicola Sturgeon – Scotland’s first minister at the time – but says:"I would also have known that they could not have pointed to a single example."Drakeford describes this as"extraordinary", adding:"I wrote very regularly to the prime minister, asking for a predictable series of meetings between heads of the four nations.
He says these decisions were"almost always" taken directly in cabinet meetings, but were occasionally made at UK government-level meetings where he was the only representative for Wales,"drawing on the knowledge of what the cabinet would have decided, from prior discussions".It’s Mark Drakeford’s final week as first minister after more than five years at the helm, and he’s set to give a whole day of evidence to the inquiry, following his initial appearance last week.
Drakeford, born and brought up in Carmarthen, became a councillor with South Glamorgan County Council in 1985 and went on to become a lecturer at Swansea University and later a professor of social policy at Cardiff University.aged 71. The couple had lived together in Pontcanna, Cardiff, for 30 years.
His replacement - Vaughan Gething or Jeremy Miles, both of whom have already given evidence this week - will be announced on Saturday.Image caption: Eluned Morgan came into the role of health minister in May 2021, part-way through the pandemicCurrent Health Minister Eluned Morgan said the Welsh government should have been more prepared for the pandemic
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