It is with much sadness – and a vast amount of shock – that Rats in a Sack learns that the civil war within the Reform group in Wales’s Senedd has claimed its first scalp.
We reported at the start of July that, after four whole weeks of working together, Reform’s 34 Senedd members had already started fighting with each other, with 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). Reform are now Wales’s official opposition.
Welsh leader Dan Thomas – a member of Barnet Council until just last year – was said to have already had a major falling-out with chief whip Llŷr Powell, a 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).
Now, the Senedd group’s chief of staff David Thomas – a part-time DJ who spins discs under the names DJ Dowster and The Bald Clark Kent and runs a window-cleaning business under the name Dr Squeegee – has stepped down. He has taken on the much more junior role of advising Pontypridd Cynon Merthyr MS Jason O’Connell, a former fellow Torfaen councillor who was elected to the Senedd in May. He is also returning to his role as head of party in Wales.
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Rats in Sack first reported on Thomas/Dowster/Kent/Squeegee back in February 2025, when he was one of three Reform councillors to post a picture of themselves on Facebook officially opening Cwmbran’s new branch of Lidl.
Except – they weren’t asked to open it and, er, didn’t. “We did not issue any invites and there was not an official ribbon-cutting ceremony at our Cwmbran store opening,” a spokeswoman for the German discount chain told us. The trio had simply turned up in the car park with their own ribbon and scissors.
A Reform spokesman said Thomas had held the chief of staff role on an “interim basis” while helping to “build the party’s team” and support its newly elected MSs.
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“During the summer recess, the group appointed a permanent Chief of Staff, and David has now returned to his role as Head of Wales for the party. Group Leader Dan Thomas thanked David personally for his support and contribution, and wished him every success in his continuing role with Reform UK.” Warm words indeed – although they were written by one D. Thomas (or Squeegee, if you prefer).
More telling might be the comments from a Reform source quoted by the website Nation.Cymru, which said he was known in the group as “Calamity Dave”.
“No one knew why he was rated by HQ and his whole appointment was a mystery,” the source said. “He had made zero impact on the development of the party, even in Brexit Party days, and then got appointed and started running the show having been an also-ran on Torfaen Borough flipping between all the party groups.”
Who could possibly have predicted it would have all started collapsing so quickly?
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