THE MAGIC DISAPPEARING ACT

FIDDLING with his pen and arranging and rearranging papers on his desk, a daffodil on the lapel of his loose-fitting grey suit only slightly relieved by a flat claret tie, Mark Drakeford said he had “no way of knowing how or if” his informal messages which mysteriously disappeared (“just like that”, as fellow Welshman Tommy Cooper used to say) from July 2018 to March 2021 could be retrieved.

There was no top hat upturned on a small square white linen cloth-wrapped-table into which a great magician under a Palladium Theatre spotlight might have put all these messages “like that, not like that” but the watching audience will still marvel at the mental sleight of hand and wonder, even sometimes out loud (though not, of course, while the act is proceeding), how on earth you could pull it off.

How, how, how, we will always wonder, when even old embarrassing drunken late night snaps, decidedly dodgy texts from decidedly dodgy texters and all manner of other compromising potentially actionable material stays doggedly and stubbornly on hard drives when Plod comes to call to trawl through Joe and Joanna Public’s internet history.

There is, of course, the underlying question, too, of whether or not data is ever truly deleted or an be retrieved if external national security decide it needs to be retrieved. This was never addressed.

How, how, how, we will always wonder.

Mark Drakeford is no ordinary Joe so the question of why didn’t even arise, of course.

Again, Like Vaughan Gething earlier, he explained for no particular reason other than to mystify and fog, that he could use two phones – it appears that Senedd members are issued with one and a second, different one may be issued to Welsh government ministers for some reason.

No explanation has ever been sought about why two phones were available to them and we still have absolutely no idea of how these are actively either needed nor how they can aid and assist us, the watching public, especially relevant given that we pay for them.

Tom Poole KC gently pointed out to him that the public now needed access to “informal methods of communication” as well as formal ones to understand the often baseless and bizarre uneducated “discussion that led to decisions being made”.

“It’s what people do all the time” Drakeford said, dismissively without even a hint of apology. I assumed that he was referring, here, to engaging in baseless, bizarre, uneducated discussion and not the systematic deletion of it after the event but I may have been wrong.

I do not systematically delete anything, by and large partly because I simply do not have the time, though I certainly do not trust the technology to make decisions for me. Whether or not this was a “magic” disappearing act with artificial intelligence acting autonomously (AGAIN) or some less savoury and sweet smelling act was – again – left entirely open to interpretation.

I think – very broadly – that people are completely relaxed about politicians engaging in baseless, bizarre and uneducated discussion because they understand how knowledge is gained but the systematic destruction and/or deletion of that material and even the process itself remains disturbing because it hints at insecurity and complete lack of the supposed assets and character traits these people are selling us at elections.

After the next election, for instance, will we get an assurance that open and transparent discussion to inform decision taking will be made routine?

Someone needed to PIN (If you’ll excuse the pun) Drakeford down.

Why are you given two phones? Isn’t this needless and wasteful? Are they ones which anyone can reach you on or just a select group of insiders? Do you ever answer it when it rings? How broad is the scope of people you engage with on these devices? Why did you only use WhatsApp 11 times when people around you seemed to be on it all the time? Which service provider did you use and were they any good?

He accepted that it was wrong to use informal methods of communication though seemed grudging because he did not think the messages “would be very helpful to anybody”. “It was against the policy of 2009” he conceded but “in the circumstances of a pandemic it did not make any sense” and, consequently, he did not give instructions to his ministers to retain all the data (unlike Nicola Sturgeon who, I think, said she did, actively misleading press and public).