Voters want to ‘punish’ us – Neil Kinnock on the plight Labour faces in Wales

In a wide-ranging interview, the former Labour leader talks history, Rachel Reeves, 20mph, Mark Drakeford, Vaughan Gething’s mistake and the challenge Wales’ current Labour leader Eluned Morgan faces

02:00, 15 Feb 2026

Given the premise of the interview we’d agreed on was the state of Labour at the moment, it’s probably fortuitous – for me at least – that as Neil Kinnock and I meet, the main topic dominating the whole Parliamentary estate is the reaction to the latest crisis Keir Starmer is facing.

Just hours before we take our seats in the House of Lords tearoom, Keir Starmer had stood in the Commons at Prime Minister’s Questions and declared Labour grandee, and his pick for US Ambassador, Peter Mandelson, had lied to him and his team and “betrayed” the country.

If the Prime Minister thought his comments would draw a line under it, he was seriously wrong. Within days, his closest aide had quit, police had raided properties linked to Mandelson, and a Prime Minister elected with a majority of 174 less than two years earlier was fighting for his political life.

It is a febrile moment for what turns into a deep and wide-ranging interview in which the former Labour leader, who represented Bedwellty and then Islwyn in Parliament for 25 years from 1970 to 1995, expresses his frustrations with senior figures like Mark Drakeford, Rachel Reeves and Vaughan Gething but his faith in the party’s leaders in Wales and Westminster: Eluned Morgan and Keir Starmer.

Lord Kinnock, who gave Peter Mandelson his first significant job, says that Labour being in power in Cardiff and Westminster creates a situation where voters are looking to give the party’s a bloody nose. And he admits that the potential damage from the Epstein affair is “limitless”.

“The damage is limitless, damage to Keir, to the party, but most of all, and I’m not being pious, most of the damage to democracy, or faith in representative government.

“Because what it reaffirms, is that political science fiction isn’t fiction, that that level of reckless corruption takes place. Now, the fact that it is once in several blue moons and it’s confined to a few individuals is irrelevant because democracy has to be Caesar’s wife, beyond pure.

“Rightly, because you can’t afford to relax on any standard. ‘Oh don’t worry about that, people will forget about it’ you cannot do that.

“You can do that if you handle the ball in the penalty area and the ref doesn’t see it, if you’re offside and the referee doesn’t see it, you can not do it with democracy”.

Given the drama of the days since we met, I did go back to him to ask if he wanted to add anything, given what had emerged, but – gracefully – he declined that offer.

A devoted Labour member since he was 14, now 70 years ago, since he quit as Labour leader in April 1992, it is clear he has held the ear of many of iterations of Labour administrations since, including the current ones in both London and Wales.

Over the hour or so we speak, his knowledge, of the intricacies and issues of both, is forensic. He is still, clearly, a player in both circles.

As I see it, I tell him, there are seemingly two main issues coming together into a perfect storm for Labour on a UK and Welsh level.

One, that the Starmer administration’s deeply unpopular decisions have led to awful approval ratings on a UK-wide level for both the administration as a whole, but also the Prime Minister personally. Secondly, Welsh Labour is facing serious questions about its 26-year-long record, which is being impacted by the UK administration’s decisions, and unpopularity, too.

So, I ask him the question few I have asked can answer – why now? Why, after decades of people in Wales voting Labour, are voters seemingly deserting them, in droves.

“A large part of it, I don’t know how much, is incumbency. You can celebrate it, but it’s a reminder as well, isn’t it?” he says.

He says Eluned’s message all the way along was that the Labour Party in Wales should have confidence in its history and its achievements but know it can do better.

“That was Eluned’s message all the way along,” he says.

That Eluned, is Eluned Morgan, Wales’ First Minister, someone he has known well since 1994, when she was elected alongside his late wife, Glenys, to the European Parliament. He is an ally of hers, a First Minister under whose watch Labour’s century-long dominance in Wales may yet come to an end. Her party is currently, in May’s Senedd election, forecast to lose its unbeaten record of power, and she herself her seat too.

She took over in August 2024, sworn in days after the dramatic resignation of Vaughan Gething, in a row over a £200,000 the Cardiff South and Penarth MS accepted to fund his leadership campaign from a businessman who had been convicted of environmental offences.

Did he, I ask, offer counsel about whether she should put her name forward to be Welsh Labour’s third leader of 2024?

“We talked about it. She didn’t ask my counsel and I insisted on not offering it,” he said.

“I was confident she could make up her own mind, and she understood nobody else could do it.

“So I said, ‘Look, you probably think it’s your duty to Wales and to Labour, and it is, but don’t let only duty decide, please put into the balance how it’s going to affect, you, Rhys, the kids.

“When it happened, I said it was going to be purgatory and I said the kind of purgatory that until you experience it, you cannot imagine.

“These are the grounds on which Michael Foot and I celebrated him not running for leadership and then he was talked into it by trade union leaders. Not out of vanity, but out of duty.

“I ran because of duty, but I had no alternative really, and in the end, duty because you had no alternative, and it is purgatory.”

“In the last 10 years, she’s become a good political practitioner, before that, she was an immensely dutiful and effective representative. But as she’s been allocated leadership positions, she has grown into it and she’s the only person currently in the Labour Party who can lead the way.

“She’s inherited such a bloody mess and part of that is incumbency,” he says.

“The other part of it began in July 2024,” he says, referencing when Keir Starmer was voted into Downing Street.

“One of them is, governments from the same party in Westminster and in Cardiff and in the initial thrill, if I can put it like that, of devolution under the Blair government, everything was new, any faults could be attributed to lack of rehearsal or novelty, and ‘give us a chance’ and people did.

“A quarter of a century on, we’re in a different business and it means that given an opportunity to punish the central government in the elections for the devolved government, the opportunity will be taken. So that’s why now.”

I tell him about polling released earlier the same week which shows the least popular decisions made by the Welsh Labour governments – to introduce the 20mph default speed limit, the resignation of Vaughan Gething, and health were the three things most voters pulled out.

On Vaughan Gething, he says: “How do you explain that? If there is a Mandelson School of Psychiatry, they would have an explanation for why Vaughan, who’s a decent guy, didn’t say, ‘Thank you for your letter offering me 200,000 quid, I’d be very grateful if you’d give me £10,000.

“He’s not stupid, far from it,” he said. “There’s no real explanation.”

“20 miles an hour only had one fundamental flaw, they didn’t explain it,” he said.

“On Wales Today, almost every bloody night there’s a village petition asking for it. They have gone with the grain. It could have been really popular.”

Labour’s record on key sectors like health and education, in the 26 years of devolution, is front and centre.

“Health is really serious, really serious because for many decades, going back to when I was on the Welsh Hospital Board in the 60s and Archie Lester was the chairman, we always had difficulty securing the best quality servants of the health service,” he said.

“Not only doctors, but administrators. We got them, but it was more by luck than judgement because they didn’t want to come and live in Wales. In those days, Cardiff wasn’t the Cardiff it is now.

“They’re still getting some good people, but not with the ease that they could get if they were Oxford, or even Portsmouths, and reputation is a difficult snake to kill.”

A key change to help health in Wales, would be reworking the Barnett formula, he says.

“The Barnett formula was not designed and cannot take into account the incidence of need, which varies. In Wales, we’ve got 3%, higher incidence of morbidity than the English average.

“The English average is buoyed because of Surrey and Sussex and so on, so the comparisons are with Yorkshire and the north east and Merseyside and that’s what the Barnett formula should take into account, both in terms of local government settlement and the devolution settlement,but it doesn’t.

“So it means that even in a ‘normal’ year, health in Wales is underfunded and in an age of austerity, it’s even more bloody underfunded, and the effect of underfunding is cumulative.

“So if you start off in year one with an £80m shortfall and you find money elsewhere, by the time you finish 30, 40 years, it’s probably about £3bn and simultaneously since 2020 you’ve been losing regional development and social funds.

“Between the difficulty of recruitment in very large parts of Wales and the underfunding, which would enable the effects of recruitment to be offset, you’ve got underperformance and once that bites in, a perfect example of this is Betsi Cadwaladr., it’s very, very difficult to cut out the rot because people get used to working at under-performance levels.

“Not because they’re bad, or because they’re unprofessionally, but because ‘that’s how we did it last year’.

“Eluned is messianic about improved health performance and where she’s got a percentage here, 2% and 5% [improvement] there, she grabs them in order to try and encourage higher ambitions for improvement.”

While the commentary now is that the decisions made by the UK Government are damaging Welsh Labour, the party cannot place all the blame at that door.

Mark Drakeford’s 2021 Senedd campaign saw the party do better than it could ever have imagined, with them winning 30 of the 60 seats. That campaign was built around him, his successes in the pandemic, when he was seen as a steady hand when other when other parties and leaders were lacking in composure and morals.

But, as it approached the point he announced his resignation, there was vocal opposition to some of his priorities and criticism he had pursued what he thought was right rather than what tackling what impacted people on the street.

“He is a basically very good man and he is a smart man. He’s got a charming simplicity about his approach to politics,” he says.

Did, I ask, Mark Drakeford’s policies set up his successor to fail? “Yes,” he answers. “I also thought you’re not doing yourself any good, especially against the background of the reputation of respect and trust that he built up during coronavirus. Because in democratic politics, that is pure gold, and very, very hard to do in the nature of the challenges.

“When you achieve it, simply by the application of integrity and rational judgement, that is such a source of strength and so, when I saw that being corroded by the decisions that didn’t appear to relate to the realities in which people live.

“20mph was one. I thought, ‘wait, what’s politically, going wrong’? In the same way, I would say, well if you’ve got this leak, it’s obvious we’ve got to replace the pipe, because somehow the solvent has come loose.”

Was it, I ask, sheer bloody-mindedness that he drove through things his priority projects – a criticism that was levelled at Mr Drakeford by his detractors.

“In a sense, it would be simpler to understand if it wasn’t as autocratic as that, but the last thing that he is an autocrat. So I don’t know.”

In terms of a loss of goodwill with voters, it is something Keir Starmer’s administration has seen, specularly. Speaking about the General Election in 2024, he says: “In many senses, the Tories lost more than we won and I was very concerned in 2024 by the low turnout.

“It’s also true that our majority is biscuit thin, which impresses itself on the government, a hell of a lot more than it should.

“I’ve sort of preached to government colleagues, ‘I know it’s 50 miles right and one inch deep, but it’s big, and you earned it, you got it, now please, act like a government’.

“Not dictatorial, but in terms of executing policy that you know will do real good, have advantage for the people.

“Instead of that, they mindlessly withdrew winter fuel allowance. I challenged them, they’re friends, they are good people who have been involved in politics since I was 16 years of age and know nothing about it.”

A question I ask regularly, is how Labour, with its resources, has not got a handle on some of these crises quicker and avoid the others from starting at all.

“A lot of what you do and want and think comes from behind your umbilical cord when it’s cut. There’s no question a Labour government should have had this mission from the Treasury which they’d given to every chancellor since the day after Gordon introduced the winter fuel allowance and said ‘you always do that, and sod off’.

“They embraced it in order to impress about six people in the Treasury with their sternness and firmness.

“They didn’t seem to comprehend that the allocation of a couple of hundred quid a year to people, most of whom are on lowest incomes had taken on the aura of rights.

“A lot of people receiving winter fuel allowances and their sons and daughters thought it was in Magna Carta. It’s only been there since 2002. They didn’t understand that.

“And then, when people could put a figure on the extent of child poverty to try to sustain the Tory policy of denying or capping child benefits, again, in order to try to impress with their sternness and firmness in a country where the more money that’s put into the economy, the better it is for growth.

“I mean it’s a pity, but it’s reality, this is a consumption-led economy, especially since Brexit, because investment has slowed down.”

He cannot fathom the change in approach from the Rachel Reeves before the election and after. He was excited when she gave the Mais lecture. “She had the whole bundle there, focus on investment, use of public resources, it was all there. That was in February. In July, she succumbs completely.”

How, I ask, does that happen?

“It’s beyond my comprehension of it. It really is. I do not understand it,” he says, banging the table to reinforce the point.

“The actions were un-Labour-things,” he says.

Can you defend it? I ask.

“No, I don’t even try to defend it, because the only loyal thing to do is to tell them to change and I’m the ultimate loyalist,” he says.

Before the Peter Mandelson saga, there was already active commentary that if Wales falls, it will be the end of the Prime Minister too.

So, can he lose Wales and survive?

“Yes, because here [Westminster], to an extent, people are inoculated by the idea of mid-term blues, and it isn’t entirely complacency, I mean to me it’s complacent, but people don’t feel that they’re being complacent.

“I’ve lived for decades by this maxim of an Italian communist, Antony Gramsci, who said the only fitting mindset for the progressive is pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

“I’ve always got some kind of hope.”

“I’ve been in the Labour party now since I was 14, which is 70 years ago last month actually and I’ve always been able to convince myself there’s a way out of this. I tell myself that. I’m having difficulty persuading myself..

“But all is not lost, Christ, we’re in government with a big majority.”

Yet, he issues a warning to his party colleagues. “I’m from Tredegar, and I know when people switch off, they develop very rapidly real animosity.

“Once it feels justified it’s very hard to dissolve. The last time I was elected in 1992, there were still people in my constituency voting on the basis of what happened in 1931 .

“They and their sons and daughters,with bloody good reason, dreadful things were done to them. I mean terrible, terrible privations and indignities were inflicted on them. But 60-odd years later, people are saying, ‘Vote Tory, Christ, my hands will fall off’.

“Once that goes in is bloody difficult and of course after a hundred years anyway with the best will in the world it’s difficult for any party to sustain freshness and to convey eagerness of service.

So could Eluned Morgan have done anything different? “She’s in the vortex and she didn’t make it,” he says.

“By the time she inherited this whirlwind, it was probably too late to score a huge success.

“But what changed from managing with something like half the seats in the Senedd, to a different situation, is the election in of a Labour government,” he says.

Is there any hope for Labour, I ask.

“There’s always hope because Keir is very bright with deep convictions. He’s an accomplished advocate, he’s a very good man, and not a politician, which could have been turned into a strength, in an age when politicians are despised.

“He has got the capacity, if he recognises his strengths, as a thoughtful advocate, capable not of theatrics, but of cold anger to develop in the next three and a half years a reputation for directness, for honesty and an ability to pick good people.”

And with that, the voting bell rings, signifying he must return to the chamber.