ON WEDNESDAY, July 11, Vaughan Gething was forced to attend the Senedd to answer an urgent question about Hannah Blythyn’s dismissal from his government.
He repeated that he had established Ms Blythun was the source of a leak to NationCymru.
In a statement on NationCymru on Thursday (July 11), the media outlet’s Chief Executive, Mark Mansfield, confirmed Hannah Blythyn was not the source for its story.
The previous day, Ms Blythyn made a personal statement to the Senedd, denying she was responsible for leaking an exchange of i-Messages to NationCymru (see p11).
MSs received Mr Gething’s response to a question from Conservative Leader Andrew RT Davies in stony silence.
Over the First Minister’s right shoulder, seated in the back row of the Chamber, Ms Blythyn reacted with disbelief to several of the Labour leader’s assertions.
Mr Gething claimed that he had called his Cabinet for a meeting to discuss the leak and – after an investigation that HE carried out – satisfied himself that the photo of the message used in the NationCymru article could only have come from Ms Blythyn’s phone.
The reactions of several Labour MSs suggested that they were waiting for him to pull the other one.
After he provided his explanation, the Conservatives proposed a motion calling for the First Minister to publish all of the evidence upon which he relied.
The motion will be debated next week.
The morning after Mr Gething addressed the Senedd, NationCymru shot his position full of holes.
Mark Mansfield said: “As a rule, we will not enter into a public debate about who may have been the source of stories we have published.
“Events of this week have, however, prompted us to consider carefully the implications of Hannah Blythyn’s statement to the Senedd on Tuesday and Vaughan Gething’s response to it on Wednesday.
He added: “We remain totally committed to protecting our sources. However, in this unprecedented situation, the board of NationCymru does not consider we can stand by and see Ms Blythyn’s reputation unjustly besmirched by the First Minister.
“No one who witnessed Ms Blythyn making her statement in the Senedd could fail to be aware of the immense impact her dismissal as a minister has had on her wellbeing. Her distress has undoubtedly been compounded by the fact that no proper investigation took place before she was dismissed.
“Instead, the First Minister decided to bypass due process and find her summarily guilty of leaking information to NationCymru.
“Given the strong public interest and importance of this story and out of concern for Hannah Blythyn’s wellbeing, we have decided that the right thing to do is to state publicly that she was not the source of our story and that at no stage before or since its publication have we had any contact with her about it.
“We can state unequivocally that Mr Gething is not telling the truth when he suggests that he has incontrovertible evidence that Ms Blythyn was our source.
“We also think it important to remind everyone that the story we published revealed that Mr Gething, when Health Minister, told ministerial colleagues that he was deleting i-Messages from a group chat because they “could be captured in an FOI”.
“We believe he has been involved in an attempt to divert attention from the fact that these were Welsh Government iMessages by suggesting that they related to a discussion that had taken place in the Labour Senedd group.
“If the messages had been related to a party meeting of any kind, they would not have been susceptible to being captured by FOI. Mr Gething must have known that they could be captured by FOI only because they were ‘Welsh Government’ iMessages.
“Similarly, there has been an attempt to suggest that the messages on the screenshot that was passed to us related to no more than banter relating to Mike Hedges, a non-ministerial member of the Senedd Labour group.
“In fact, Mr Gething’s own words in the ‘leaked’ messages confirm that the discussion related to more than that.
He stated: ‘Deleting the messages in this group. They can be captured in an FOI, and I think we are all in the right place regarding the choice being made. ‘
As we have reported previously, the “choice being made” was the decision to base GCSE and A-level results on teachers’ assessments because students had been unable to sit exams because of Covid restrictions. There had been uproar about an earlier decision to base results on an algorithm.
“The fact that the discussion related to a ministerial decision about the handling of Covid meant that the iMessages constituted Welsh Government business. Ministers were already under an obligation to preserve such messages because they were subject to FOI disclosure. Subsequently, they should have been disclosed to the UK Covid Inquiry.
“Whoever passed us the screenshot was performing a public service. The messages should have been in the public domain anyway.
“Mr Gething’s admission that he was deleting messages conflicts with what he in due course told the Inquiry, which was that messages had been deleted from his mobile phone not by him but when it was being ‘refitted’ by the Senedd’s IT department.
“Hannah Blythyn has behaved with integrity. Vaughan Gething has not.”
Responding to Nation Cymru’s bombshell intervention, Andrew RT Davies said: “With Hannah Blythyn’s account seemingly corroborated, it is almost impossible to believe the First Minister’s version of events.”
