Reform's man in Caerphilly is keeping shtum on Nathan Gill

With Caerphilly set to go to the polls in a crucial Senedd by-election, questions continue to surround what Reform candidate Llŷr Powell knew about the activities of his former employer Nathan Gill and when.

Normally a motormouth, Powell – who party leader Nigel Farage refers to as “Welsh Dave” rather than learn how to pronounce his name – has been curiously reticent to talk about Gill, who is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to accepting cash for making positive statements about Russia in the European Parliament.

In a BBC Radio Wales interview last week Powell appeared to lose his rag with the presenter, saying it was “really low” to ask about the serious crimes committed by his former party leader, adding: “For political opponents to smear my name with this, I find it absolutely disgusting.

Suggested Reading

Nathan Gill: a scandal with no outrage

Patience Wheatcroft

“No one’s asking questions of other parties of what they knew about when their members have done some horrific things in particular. There’s some real questionable things being done there, and I haven’t heard the other parties speak about those members before.”

Then, asked by independent media operation The Will Hayward Newsletter when Powell last had direct contact with Gill, whether by phone, email, text or Whatsapp, Reform initially said that “Llŷr has answered these questions”, before directing them to an interview with WalesOnline in which their man completely cleared it up by saying: “If I’m being totally honest with you I don’t know whether it was the Brexit night when we actually left and it was like a: ‘Can you believe this?’ I think that might have been a message.” They then failed to respond to follow-up messages about when “Brexit night” actually was.

Llŷr Powell now has a decent shot of being Wales’s next first minister. Despite his protestations that “no one’s asking questions of other parties”, the last first minister who failed to answer pretty basic questions from the media – Labour’s Vaughan Gething, over whether he had deliberately deleted Covid-related messages from his phone – was gone within weeks.