Is Reform’s leader in Wales bored with life in the Senedd just weeks after being elected? That’s the rumour in Cardiff Bay, with Dan Thomas said to be already eyeing up a seat at Westminster in the event Andy Burnham calls a snap general election.
Thomas – a former North London Conservative council leader personally selected for the role by Nigel Farage despite not having lived in Wales for two decades – is said to be sniffing around for a safe seat should Burnham pull the trigger on an election.
The rise of Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain is worrying Reform chiefs who fear that, if they continue polling at Makerfield levels, only Llanelli and Montgomeryshire would be considered bankable seats for Reform in Wales. And the latter is being eyed up by Laura Anne Jones, another Tory defector who, like Thomas, was only returned to the Senedd in May. Despite now being Wales’s leader of the opposition, Thomas’s sights are now said to be on Llanelli.
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Part of Thomas’s frustration is said to stem from – and you might want to sit down for this one – the fact that, after four whole weeks of working together, Reform’s 34 Senedd members have already started falling out with each other.
In a harbinger of what might befall the wider party, there is said to be huge tension between longer-term Reform/Brexit Party types and the more recent Tory defectors who were granted pretty much all the top seats under Wales’s new super-constituency system (the final decision was, unsurprisingly, Farage’s).
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Nowhere is this more significant than at the very top of the party, where Thomas – a member of Barnet Council until just last year – is said to have already had a major falling-out with chief whip Llŷr Powell, Brexit Party stalwart and former advisor to the party’s now jailed leader Nathan Gill (Farage calls Powell “Welsh Dave” rather than learn how to pronounce his name).
And allied to all this is the fact that several Reform members have clocked that, were just five of them to defect to Restore Britain, the Senedd would be forced to recognise them as a formal group – with all the public funding that would bring, not least a party leader’s salary to whoever they put in charge.
In other words, it’s all going about as well as you’d expect!
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