Plaid’s infamous “senior sources” are at it again. They get away with it not because, as they think, no-one knows who they are, but because short of an admission, or a journalistic breach of confidence, it’s impossible to prove. From experience, it’s often a case of people who absent themselves from meetings and discussions where decisions are made using a friendly reporter to pursue their personal agendas anonymously.
Ostensibly, one of the issues which has led to this little spat revolves around the question of the manifesto for the Assembly election, and who did or did not write it. Simon Thomas and Rhuanedd Richards both get some flak in this article, one for allegedly not having written it, and the other for allegedly writing it. (Although one of my anonymous commenters told me back in May that it was neither of them that wrote it, since “after meeting Nerys recently I was very much under the impression it was a solo effort” - i.e. by Nerys.) It reminds me rather of another bit of consultant speak – “Whilst success has many fathers, failure is a bastard”.
In fairness to whichever of the three – or whoever else – actually wrote the words which appeared, the basic thrust of the document was very much laid down by Ieuan. The wordsmith(s) was/were then tasked, essentially, with trying to make it look as if it might in some way resemble a silk purse. I thought they did a good job; it was far the best quality rhetoric, as I noted at the time. The problem is that even the very best rhetoric is no substitute for a lack of content.
However, the key word above is “ostensibly”. As the report itself suggested, I suspect that the “sources” aren’t really interested at all in manifestos or the remit of the party’s directors; this is all about pursuing agendas – promoting the image of favoured candidates, or undermining the image of unfavoured candidates. It’s what many of the anonymous briefings have been about over the years.
It isn’t only Plaid that suffers from this phenomenon, of course. Indeed, Plaid has been something of a latecomer to the practice, albeit a fast learner. It’s a fairly natural outcome from a political process which rates personality and career as more important than mission, but it’s a diversion from real debate about direction and policy.
And that’s the worst aspect of this latest outbreak of indiscipline. Whether Plaid is or is not in turmoil as the paper chose to report it is of peripheral relevance here; the real problem is that there are too many people in the party who have learned nothing from the last decade. A change of leadership is an opportunity to put the timidity of that decade into the past, and re-affirm a sense of mission and purpose. But concentrating attention on personality and the promotion of careers amounts to a continuation of current direction rather than a break from it. Just as rhetoric is no substitute for substance, so personal agendas are no substitute for collective ones.
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