Wales the happy hunting ground for Reform

Good morning. Two apologies. The first is that in Monday’s newsletter I lazily dumped some railways that you felt were better characterised as “public-private hybrid railways” as “publicly-owned railways”. Much as I might want to make excuses for myself, you were right and I was wrong.

The second is that I forgot to include this apology in yesterday’s newsletter, and I don’t like to leave it too long to issue a clarification.

Today’s newsletter is about the Welsh parliamentary elections in 2026 and the state of the Reform party.

Farage and the new defectors

A regular part of my life as political editor at the New Statesman was to meet the leader of the Welsh Labour party after a bruising defeat for the Labour party and to ask if the same thing was going to happen to the party at the Senedd.

Labour kept enduring painful losses, yet in Wales it kept on holding seats that it had lost at Westminster in elections to the Welsh legislature.

Under both Carwyn Jones and Mark Drakeford, Welsh Labour made a habit of entering election year in a weak position in the polling before coming back to win. In general, this is what we’d expect: outside of election season, people focus on how they feel about the government in general. When they actually start concentrating on the alternatives, they turn back towards the government.

So for that reason, given the Welsh election is not until 2026, I am reluctant to make any specific predictions about whether or not the latest polling, showing essentially a four-way race between Labour, Plaid Cyrmu, the Welsh Conservatives and Reform, is right.

What I will say is that Wales has generally proved to be a very happy hunting ground for Reform and for Farage parties in general, and I don’t see any persuasive reason this should change.

My general view is that the past is usually a pretty good guide to the future. Therefore, the government will probably recover (even the Conservatives in July 2024 did better than the polls suggested at the start of the campaign) and Reform will do well (Nigel Farage’s parties, whether Ukip, the Brexit party, or Abolish the Assembly, not a Farage-backed party but one with many similar personnel, all did very well in Welsh elections).

So my assumption is that after the next Welsh election, there will be a Labour government of some description but that Reform will have made many gains.

When you add that to the defectors that Reform has already pulled over — Andrea Jenkyns, the former Tory MP for Morley and Outwood, now running to be Reform’s candidate for the Lincolnshire mayor, and highly likely to win, plus Tim Montgomerie, the founding editor of ConservativeHome, who yesterday joined Reform — it seems likely to me that the party is here for the foreseeable future. It will have both defectors and elected representatives who will not want to fold in behind the Tory party without big concessions.

As a result, the 2024 election, in which we had four parties with a strong base in the country, looks likely to be the new norm in my view, unless some enterprise of great pitch and moment throws up a change we don’t expect.

Now try this

I absolutely loved the Philharmonia’s take on Dimitri Shostakovich’s Moscow, Cheryomushki, a comic operetta about the Soviet housing market, which you can listen to here. I saw it on Sunday and greatly enjoyed the orchestral version, and am now listening to the “proper” version with opera singers. It is both a beautiful piece of music and a wonderful reminder that even a system as bleak and as evil as Joseph Stalin’s USSR can produce things of great beauty.

Top stories today

• On track | South Western Railway is set to be the first train operator nationalised by Labour, followed by 2c and Greater Anglia.

• Elevation | Keir Starmer is planning to award a peerage to his former chief of staff Sue Gray, as well as to ex-MPs who stepped down from safe Labour seats ahead of the UK general election and made way for new party talent.

• Junked | Unhealthy versions of breakfast cereals including muesli, porridge oats and granola will be included in a UK junk food advertising ban from next year.

• British Steel | The government has admitted nationalising British Steel is one option open to it if its efforts to rescue the lossmaking Chinese-owned company fail in the coming months. 

• Marbles on the move? | Greece is optimistic of striking a deal with the British Museum on the Parthenon Sculptures as soon as next year, after Downing Street reiterated that Keir Starmer would not stand in the way of an agreement between the two sides.