Devolution support left me 'wrong-footed', says Crabb

Stephen Crabb, who addressed the assembly in June, admits it is here to stay

Welsh Secretary Stephen Crabb has admitted he was "slightly wrong-footed" by a change in public opinion in favour of devolution.

He told a think tank's magazine he was "slower than some" in recognising the assembly was here to stay.

Mr Crabb, who has unveiled plans to give more powers to Wales, said he was no longer a "devo-sceptic".

He urged opposition parties in the assembly to co-operate to force Labour from power at the 2016 election.

'Major shift'

Mr Crabb told the Institute of Welsh Affairs magazine The Welsh Agenda he was surprised at the size of the majority voting in favour of full law-making powers for the assembly in the 2011 referendum.

"I was slightly wrong-footed by this," he said.

Referring to his own Preseli Pembrokeshire parliamentary seat, he added: "I didn't anticipate that people in Pembrokeshire were going to vote for full law-making powers for the assembly in quite the way they did.

"What that says is there has been a major shift in Welsh public sentiment about devolution since that first referendum [in 1997]."

Mr Crabb urged opposition parties to work together to put Labour's Carwyn Jones out of power

Mr Crabb said he would no longer describe himself as a "devo-sceptic" or agree, as he wrote in 2007, that devolution was leading to "constitutional vandalism".

On the prospect of unseating the Labour Welsh government in the May 2016 election, he said: "We need to be thinking about the C-word - coalition.

"I want the other parties in the assembly to think in different ways about how to achieve a non-Labour alternative."

As for his own future, Mr Crabb said he did not have "an ambition" to be Conservative leader but would like to do another cabinet job, as long as he had "the opportunity to bring my own values to bear and my own thinking".

"That's what I love about the job of being Secretary of State for Wales," he added.