5 June 2020updated 02 Sep 2021 11:00am

Welsh voters are starting to appreciate Mark Drakeford

The First Minister's time at the top has been difficult, but our latest poll shows that his standing has begun to increase.

By Roger Awan-Scully

Welsh Labour leader Mark Drakeford speaks at a rally as Britain's opposition Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn campaigns for the general election in Swansea, south Wales on December 7, 2019. - Britain will go to the polls on December 12, 2019 to vote in a pre-Christmas general election. (Photo by DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS / AFP) (Photo by DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS/AFP via Getty Images)

Mark Drakeford has been First Minister of Wales, and leader of the Welsh Labour party, for approximately 18 months now. It is fair to say that this period has not been a very successful one for Wales’s long-dominant party. Those 18 months have seen the worst-ever poll rating for Labour in Wales. In last year’s European election, the party came third in a Wales-wide contest for the first time in any election since before World War I, and for the first time ever finished behind Plaid Cymru.

Then in December’s general election, although Labour came first in Wales again (for the 27th general election in a row), they lost considerable ground to Conservatives – who equalled the number of Welsh seats they had won in the 1983 Thatcher landslide, and got their best vote share in Wales since 1910.