If anyone inside No 10 allowed themselves a sigh of relief at Reform UK’s advance being stymied in the Caerphilly byelection, they would then have heard the warning from Lindsay Whittle, Plaid Cymru’s winning candidate: “You are on your way out after 100-plus years.”
Labour in Wales might or might not be “a dying beast”, as Whittle argued, but this one-off Senedd race illustrated how it was on course to lose its grip on Welsh politics in May, with potentially wider implications for Keir Starmer and his party.
The idea that the full Senedd elections will result in Labour being supplanted by Plaid and Reform has long been heralded by polling, but here it was in stark voting figures: a Labour share of 46% when the seat was previously contested in 2021, now down to 11%; a consistent first place in the town since the Senedd was created in 1999 had tumbled to third.
This signals not just a seismic shift in Welsh politics, it is also likely to create huge ripples in Westminster, with many Labour MPs and ministers viewing May’s elections in England, Wales and Scotland as a pivotal moment for the prime minister.
Whittle’s warning from outside that Labour must “get back to the drawing board” is a sentiment shared by many within the party, and if the forthcoming elections end particularly badly, there will be serious consideration as to whether Starmer is the man to do this.
The slightly more hopeful lesson for the government, and for other parties facing Reform UK’s rapid and seemingly inexorable rise, is that Nigel Farage’s party can be beaten. Bookmakers had Reform’s Llyr Powell as the favourite in Caerphilly yet Whittle secured a majority of nearly 4,000.
There were two seeming factors to this: one was evidence of strong tactical voting from both sides, with the Conservatives squeezed to just 2% of the vote, and the Liberal Democrats and Greens below even this.
Labour’s reduced vote would also have been affected, with voters aware that Plaid was the better “stop Reform UK” option. This is a potential obstacle for Farage’s party, even if tactical voting tends to work less effectively amid the noise of a general election.
The other lesson is more prosaic, though just as important: pick a strong local candidate. Whittle is exactly that to an almost absurd degree, having been a local councillor for nearly 50 years, standing for the Caerphilly Westminster seat 10 times and previously being a regional Senedd member.
Nonetheless, Friday’s result represents a clear disappointment for Reform, particularly after Farage joined the campaign trail. It is possible the party’s chances were hampered by the news that its former leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, had admitted to taking bribes to make pro-Russia comments in the European parliament.
However, as Powell noted after his loss, the campaign would have been a valuable learning ground for the new party: “A big part of what we were trying to do here is to master our campaigning. We’ve trained so many people up on our systems.”
And finally, what of the Conservatives, so often half-forgotten in discussions of UK politics? While they can argue they were squeezed by tactical voting, a 2% total – just 690 votes – remains a dreadful result, and will not make Tory MPs any more confident in Kemi Badenoch’s ability to turn around her ailing party.
This is the key lesson from Caerphilly for every political leader, if not necessarily a new one: UK politics is moving at speed, with voter loyalties shifting and atomising in unprecedented ways. Those who cannot adapt will be crushed.
