Comment

  With Patrick O'Brien

PLAID CYMRU and the SNP had an unassailable point of principle on their side when they argued that it was wrong to exclude them from the televised leaders’ debates.

Some voters will certainly have been left with the idea that the contest in Wales and in Scotland was between three parties, so it was wrong to relegate either party to the relative wilderness of regional TV.

But Plaid leader Ieuan Wyn Jones was simplistic when he suggested after Thursday’s night’s trauma that this was the sole cause of Plaid’s failure to take the Labour-held target constituencies of Ynys Mon and Llanelli, and to reconquer Ceredigion.

In the case of Ceredigion at least, the origins of last week’s dizzying defeat may go back much further than this election.

Back to May 2007, when Plaid’s overall gains at the expense of Labour in the Assembly polls ushered in nine weeks of tortured inter-party horse-trading that ended with a historic power-sharing agreement between traditionally bitter enemies.

For a lot of people it has apparently been easy to forget, during the last few weeks, that since 2007 the Assembly government has been run by Labour and Plaid Cymru.

It would indeed have been easy to forget that we are supposed to see Labour in Cardiff as allies and in London as demons when Alastair Darling was trying to defend the indefensible - threatening frontline services in Wales by shortchanging Cardiff by £3 billion over the next three years through the Barnett formula, the discredited block-grant mechanism which decrees the level of funding for Wales.

Plaid Cymru’s adversarial stance towards Labour at these elections was understandable in a UK context. The trouble was that it inevitably revived bewilderment and suspicion about its coalition with Labour in Wales. In Ceredigion, to those feelings you could probably add indignation on the part of a good many voters.

The interesting thing about Ceredigion during election campaigns is that no-one really has any idea who will win.

Pundit analysis is in short supply, and opinion polls are rarely taken. But look at the history. In every general election in the late 1970s and the 1980s Labour languished in third place in Ceredigion. In the 1990s and up to and including the 2005 election it came in fourth, apart from in 1997. From 1992 onwards, it has always come below Plaid Cymru in the popular vote.

Crucially, in the 2007 Assembly election Labour grovelled in fourth place behind the Conservatives, Lib-Dems and Plaid with a wretched 5.1 per cent share of the vote. Elin Jones cruised in with more than 14,800 votes (49.2 share) against Linda Grace’s 1,530 for Labour. The Lib-Dems’ John Davies took over 10,800 votes and the Tories’ Trefor Jones more than 2,300.

Yet nine weeks later Plaid, having considered and rejected a so-called rainbow coalition with the Lib-Dems and the Tories to form a Plaid-led government, opted instead for a deal with Labour, the clinching argument being that Labour would agree, within four years, to a referendum on full law-making powers for the Assembly.

Back in Ceredigion, Plaid Cymru loftily assumed that this would all be all right with voters who had just wholeheartedly backed Plaid and flicked away Labour as a flea from the back of the hand. The assumption was made.

But of opinion polls there were none. Would it therefore be so terribly surprising if, three years later, the voters of Ceredigion had sought to settle this particular score by rejecting the party that took Wales into an alliance on which it was never consulted, an alliance nothing less than bizarre given the outcome of the 2007 Assembly election result in the county?

Particularly just now, when this coalition is telling women with breast cancer that, in future, treatment will no longer be available at Bronglais Hospital and they will have to drag themselves 70 miles along a tortuous route to Llandudno?