Wales Office was seen as fractious, says Stephen Crabb

Stephen Crabb (L) said the problems were not the fault of David Jones (R)

The Wales Office had a reputation for being "fractious" with Downing Street and Cardiff Bay, ex-Welsh Secretary Stephen Crabb has told a think tank.

He told the Institute for Government he did not think the department worked "particularly effectively" before he became secretary of state in 2014.

Mr Crabb said the Wales Office should act as a "bridge" to Welsh ministers.

But he said relations between the UK and Welsh governments had "hit a low" under his predecessor David Jones.

The Preseli Pembrokeshire Conservative MP made his observations in one of a series of interviews with ex-ministers published by the think tank on Thursday.

Mr Crabb left the Wales Office to become work and pensions secretary in March 2016, later becoming one of several contenders for the Tory leadership who lost out to Theresa May.

"The view that I had was that if the job of being secretary of state for Wales and the department of the Wales Office had any purpose at all in 2014, then it needed to be acting as a bridge to a devolved government rather than being a source of friction and argument," he said.

"So my first priority was to be seen quite visibly to mend relations.

"I think it is fair to say, and not through any fault of his, but under my predecessor at the Wales Office relations between the UK government and the Welsh government had hit a low and it was playing quite badly in the Welsh media."

Mr Crabb said that he felt that the job he could do for the prime minister was to "fix that", to "put ourselves on the side of being reasonable nice guys".

Carwyn Jones, Stephen Crabb, Barack Obama and David Cameron during the Nato summit

He said that the Wales Office was much more about "projecting a voice and a face of UK government and then representing Welsh interests back into UK government around the Cabinet table".

"That is the essential purpose of it and I felt I did very well in that role, generally changing the mood, setting a different tone and then setting myself a couple of benchmarks of things I wanted to achieve."

Mr Crabb said the Scottish independence referendum "changed the show altogether".

"David Cameron made that announcement of a new constitutional conversation," he said.

"So, suddenly I was given my mandate by the PM to pick up a stalled devolution agenda that had slightly run into the sand and warm it up a bit and do something with it.

"So that's what I did: we set up the St David's Day process and began drafting a bill to do some of this stuff."

'Obama loved it'

He said that moving to the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) signalled a huge change in the volume of work, after the Wales Office.

"At the Wales Office I had a box [of documents to deal with] every weekend and in truth, I could whistle through it in an hour and a half.

"At DWP, you're getting a box every night and it's full," he said.

Reflecting on the NATO summit in Newport in 2014 he said "the PM loved it, the Welsh media loved it, Obama loved it".

Mr Crabb resigned from the government last July following newspaper allegations about his private life.