Nigel Farage was a fixture on the streets of Caerphilly on the day of its by-election – in its pubs and its town centre campaign headquarters, its front door flanked by huge pictures of Farage himself and a Union flag on one side, candidate Llŷr Powell and Y Ddraig Goch on the other. Yet once it became clear that Reform was not going to take this Senedd seat, one they had invested heavily in, the party leader did a disappearing act that the town’s favourite son, Tommy Cooper, would have been proud of.
Farage was not there at the count, one he had been expected to make all about himself had Powell won the seat. Powell himself said little, gracelessly refusing to make a concession speech and exchanging a few curt words with journalists before also departing. It was left to Francesca O’Brien, a little-known Swansea councillor put up by Reform to field interview requests to insist “it is still a victory for us”.
But it wasn’t a victory for Reform, despite going from 1.7% last time around to 36% this time. Reform threw the absolute kitchen sink at Caerphilly, its HQ bedecked with TV screens with real-time canvassing data and AI projections of vote shares. As one party official told The Times two weeks ago: “We’re not fucking around.” And yet they lost.
Why? Partly because, while their air war is strong – Reform in effect have their own TV channel, for heaven’s sake – their ground war remains relatively weak, especially when they have no council presence. This was always Ukip’s problem – winning European elections, incapable of picking up individual seats. And while they had canvassing data, it’s questionable how much they took into account not just who people would vote for them, but whether they would and even whether they could – it appears many Reform-adjacent residents weren’t registered to vote.
Plus, as Jeremy Corbyn discovered in 2019, basing a campaign around persuading people who don’t vote to vote for you is not a winner, because there is one thing which unites people who don’t vote: they don’t vote.
Caerphilly also demonstrates starkly another issue that faces Reform: Wales is still, essentially, a centre left nation with no history of the hard right. As the turnout shows – a rise from 44% in 2021 to 50.4% last night, which is phenomenal – when the hard right poses a threat, the electorate will turn to the progressive alternative most likely to defeat them. In Caerphilly, that was Plaid Cymru.
Plaid’s victory appears to have stunned many in the UK media, but it didn’t come out of the blue – while the Valleys have not historically been fertile territory for Plaid, they have long had a strong presence in Caerphilly where its candidate, the loquacious Lindsay Whittle, has been a fixture on the council for half a century, focusing on bread-and-butter issues.
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Make no mistake, Plaid are now the frontrunners for next year’s Senedd election. Under Rhun ap Iorwerth, a smart-suited former BBC journalist with the easygoing manner in front of a camera that experience brings, they are now almost tasked with a Starmer-esque ‘ming vase’ strategy of getting over the line next May without any major disasters.
In fact, there is one scenario, under Wales’ new electoral system which kicks in next year, in which they do too well, taking so many seats from Labour they are denied a suitable coalition partner to give them a majority. Which brings us to… Labour.
Labour are, if we may employ the vernacular of the Reform official above, fucked. Their candidate, an uninspiring bookseller called Richard Tunnicliffe, took 11.1% of the vote. To put that in perspective, under the new electoral system a party will have to take about 14% of the vote in each mega-constituency to get one MS elected. If this was replicated throughout Wales, Labour would be wiped out.
It is unclear whether, under first minister Eluned Morgan, elected unopposed on the basis she was neither the warring Vaughan Gething or Jeremy Miles, Welsh Labour is capable of addressing this. She is getting nothing out of the UK Labour government, while simultaneously refusing to criticise Keir Starmer, who failed to visit Caerphilly once. Morgan, and her economy minister and predecessor Mark Drakeford, now face the incredibly difficult task of getting their budget through the Senedd without a majority or seeing it slashed.
The Welsh Conservatives are not worth the length of this sentence.
But inevitably, outside Wales, it is Reform’s failure that attention will focus on. Pollster Peter Kellner writes that “however privately he keeps the thought to himself, Nigel Farage should conclude that his party did not just fall short of what it hoped for yesterday; it fell short of what he needed to be on course to become prime minister”.
That, inevitably, will lead to fallings-out, as is the Farage party way. Powell, who has pitched himself as the leader in Wales, is not universally popular with colleagues. Laura Anne Jones, its only member of the Senedd after defecting from the Conservatives from July, will fancy her chances of raising her profile. And rumours persist that Farage refuses to appoint a formal Welsh leader as he wishes to take part in next year’s leader’s debates himself, despite not actually running for the Senedd.
That, of course, is based on the idea that he is an electoral elixir for his party. Last night, Farage proved he is not. Just like that, as Caerphilly’s favourite son would say.
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