O Little Town Of Betws-y-Coed

A Christmas interlude in Labour-run Wales

It’s hard to imagine words better calculated to make one long for the sweet embrace of death than “It’s a good job the nativity didn’t take place in Labour-run Wales”. I’m sorry, therefore, to have to tell you that yesterday in Parliament, Leader of the House of Commons Penny Mordaunt uttered the words “It’s a good job the nativity didn’t take place in Labour-run Wales”.¹

She didn’t stop there. That was the jumping-off point for an extended riff about what might have happened if the nativity had taken place in Labour-run Wales, of which Mordaunt was so proud that she tweeted a video of it from her own account. This is a level of misplaced pride to which the word “inordinate” cannot do justice.

It’s nearly Christmas, and there hasn’t been much interesting attack material for this Substack to focus on in the last few days, so let’s go through it. Why, you noisily demand, is it a good job the nativity didn’t happen in Labour-run Wales? I’m glad you asked.

First of all, it turns out, in Labour-run Wales “Mary and Joseph would have been clobbered for an overnight stay levy”. It’s hard to know quite on what basis they would have had to pay it, since very famously there was no room at the inn and the levy - which, it’s perhaps important to acknowledge, does not yet exist - is designed to be imposed on visitors staying overnight in visitor accommodation, which stables aren’t. More to the point, the reason Mary and Joseph were in Bethlehem in the first place is that “it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed”. This is a story - not set, let us be clear, in Labour-run Wales - about mass-displacement of populations for tax reasons. You can think that’s a bit worse than an overnight stay levy even if you think an overnight stay levy is a bad idea. If the nativity had taken place in Labour-run Wales, Mary and Joseph would simply have been allowed to stay at home.

Next, Mordaunt turns to Mary’s birth experience. “She’d have had poor maternity services”, she tells us. OK. Let’s not gloss over problems with maternity services in the Welsh NHS, which are real and which deserve to be more than a weak punchline in a minister’s speech. But for now, this is a weak punchline in a minister’s speech. So we should probably pause for a moment to remind ourselves that in the story of the nativity, Mary did not have any maternity services at all and was reduced to laying her newborn baby in a manger. This is a bar for maternity service quality which even the Conservatives would have to accept Labour-run Wales can pass.

Mordaunt hasn’t finished. “The shepherds”, she tells us, “would not have been able to take the time off to bear witness due to cuts in the rural affairs budget”. Mordaunt appears to be under the impression that the shepherds, after “the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them”, and after “there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God”, and after “the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us”, and before “they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger”,² were able to negotiate time off and arrange cover, thanks to the existence of some sort of well-functioning and adequately funded state apparatus around rural affairs, rather than - as the carol has it - simply “leaving their flocks”.

Are we done yet? No. Apparently in Labour-run Wales “the three wise men would have arrived post-Epiphany due to the blanket 20mph speed limit and the poor condition of the road network”. Now on the one hand, this is obviously silly: it is highly unlikely that anyone travelling anywhere in the world 2,000 years ago was in a position to exceed a 20mph speed limit. As someone³ asked on Twitter, “Is she thinking of ‘one in a taxi, one in a car, one on a scooter blowing his hooter’? Does she know that’s not canon?” But on the other hand, Mordaunt is obviously right: Wales is a bit more than 3,000 miles from Bethlehem and there’s no way the wise men could have got there “from the East” without weeks or months of additional travel time. It is very hard to blame the Labour Party for this though.

OK, she’s done.

One could quibble with other aspects of Mordaunt’s analysis, notably that she misses out King Herod’s decision to kill all male children under two years old in the area around where Jesus was born, which goes quite a long way beyond anything in Mark Drakeford’s programme and arguably rebalances the scale quite a long way towards Welsh Labour, genocide-wise. In the end, Labour-run Wales isn’t that bad.

Politicians are always under pressure to come up with jokes, to lighten the tone in their speeches and make them seem like the kind of people who can come up with jokes.⁴ That means their advisers are also under pressure to come up with jokes.⁵ As Penny Mordaunt has just shown, sometimes the pressure is just too great.

This isn’t necessarily the last Dividing Lines post before Christmas - we’ll see, I mostly just post things when I notice interesting political attack material and have time to write something. But it might well be, because politics does tend to slow down a bit at this time of year and it wouldn’t surprise me if neither party does anything interesting for a bit - and also because I’m about to have my family over. I did this one because I quite enjoy overanalysing jokes way beyond the level they were ever designed to bear, and I’m gambling that if you’ve subscribed to this newsletter then you’re prepared to indulge this every now and then (if you haven’t subscribed yet, but you are prepared to indulge this every now and then, please do subscribe). They say - in fact, I said, in my second ever post on this Substack - that you can’t rebut a joke. Well, you can if it’s by Penny Mordaunt. Happy Christmas.

1. I wrote about the Tories’ “what about Labour-run Wales” attack a few weeks ago, and since then Keir Starmer has deployed quite a good response to it. At a PMQs in November he pointed out that “More than double the entire population of Wales are currently on a waiting list in England”. I like this because a) it’s true; b) it sounds like a big number; c) it’s unfair in exactly the same way the Tory attack is unfair, in that it glosses over meaningful differences between England and Wales which mean it’s not always useful to compare the two, which means they can’t complain about it.

2. This is like one of those annoying sentences about the importance of the Oxford comma, isn’t it?

3. It was someone replying to me from a locked account, so this is as much of a citation as you’re getting.

4. It can be extraordinarily easy to have these written up positively, as with the frankly underwhelming jokes Rishi Sunak reportedly made at this week’s Christmas party for Tory MPs.

5. As an occasional contributor of this kind of joke, I was once introduced to Eddie Izzard by a senior Labour politician with “This is Tom, he’s good at jokes”, which is a bit like being introduced to Mo Farah with “This is Tom, he sometimes does Parkrun”.