Gay sex scandal minister’s political comeback
The politician who provided the first sex scandal of Tony Blair’s government has told ITV that he intends to stand for the Welsh Assembly.
Ron Davies was Secretary of State for Wales in 1998, when an incident on Clapham Common forced him to resign from the government.
He described what had happened as an “error of judgement,” but never fully explained the exact sequence of events.
Speaking on ITV Wales’ Waterfront programme last night, Mr Davies said that he is considering standing as a candidate for the Forward Wales party in the Welsh Assembly elections in May.
Davies, 60, was a Labour high-flier in the early days of Tony Blair’s New Labour government.
He became MP for Caerphilly in 1983 and was appointed a front bench agriculture spokesman in 1987.
In 1992 he won election to the Shadow Cabinet and was appointed shadow Secretary of State for Wales.
His appointment to the Cabinet in that role after the Labour landslide of 1997 should have been the beginning of a glittering career in government.
Davies led the successful referendum campaign that established the Welsh Assembly and is seen as the architect of devolution.
He won the Labour party’s nomination for First Minister of Wales in 1998.
His decision to visit Clapham Common in October 1998 was to prove his undoing.
He claimed he was going for a walk, and accepted an invitation from a man to go and dine with him.
He was mugged, and the tabloids seized on the whiff of a sex scandal.
Davies resigned, telling the Prime Minister very little of the detail of what happened, leading the Downing St press secretary, Alistair Campbell, to coin the phrase “a moment of madness.”
Davies, married three times and the father of two children, later admitted he is bisexual.
He was elected to the Welsh Assembly in 1999, and stood down from Westminster in 2001.
Just before the 2003 Assembly elections,
Despite his protestations that he was merely there looking for badgers, Davies was forced out.
Now this political Lazarus has joined Forward Wales, a socialist party that seeks to provide an alternative to Labour, who dominate Welsh politics.
Davies told ITV last night that he would decide in the next few weeks whether to contest his old constituency of Caerphilly in the Welsh Assembly elections, which are on 3rd May.
“If I were to stand I would stand in Caerphilly, my old seat. I think it’s important to give people a choice,” he said.
“Forward Wales has been left behind by the Labour Party.”