Opposition parties come to terms with local election losses

Every Tuesday in the Assembly the three opposition parties hold press briefings which usually cover a wide range of matters. This week though there was only one main question which, with variations, was essentially, 'Why did you do so badly?'

The Leader of the Welsh Conservatives in the Assembly, Andrew RT Davies repeated his claim set out in the leaked email I told you about last week that the party must 'develop and communicate a clear and concise Welsh Conservative message. That's been taken as not-so-veiled criticism of the leading role played in the Welsh campaign by Westminster-based Tories. Not so, says Mr Davies, it's the fact that no matter what they did or said, Welsh Conservatives were 'drowned out' by negative stories about the party at a UK level.

Mr Davies repeated his call for a more distinct Welsh party to emerge under a Welsh Conservative leader, but insisted that wasn't a reaction to the election results and to be fair he has previously set out that idea. But he described the next three years without any major elections as a 'golden opportunity' for the party in Wales to get its structures right. He'll face opposition to that from some Westminster colleagues but after just a year in the job, his focus is on the longer term.

There was also an admission from the Welsh Liberal Democrat leader Kirsty Williams that the party had suffered a backlash from voters angry at decisions taken by the UK coalition government and angry that the Lib Dems are part of that government. But she said that although the 'vast majority' of the party's lost votes last week could be 'attributed to London,' she said it would be 'lazy' to blame it all on UK matters and said the Welsh party must see what it could do better and why it managed to hold on in some places and not others. She said,

As for Plaid Cymru, it fell to Simon Thomas AM to field the difficult questions, including one about why his leader wasn't doing that particular job. His view of what went wrong with the party's campaign also acknowledged Labour's success:

The task now, he said, for the party and the new leader, was to try to offer a similar sort of 'emotional comfort blanket.'