Can Reform in Wales turn it around?

The Reform group in the Welsh parliament has just had a nightmare 24 hours. On the first day that the Senedd returned after recess, Dan Thomas was forced to resign as leader, following his arrest on suspicion of assault and controlling or coercive behaviour. An hour after this news broke, Sarah Cooper-Lesadd defected to Plaid Cymru, firing off a withering statement about Nigel Farage’s party. Four months after the Welsh elections, Reform are now leaderless and have lost the first of their 34 members. As one MS put it to me, ‘Sarah probably won’t be the last.’ The move pushes Plaid closer to a majority in the 90-member parliament.

Farage has desperately tried to project Reform as a new force that will not suffer the same problems as his previous parties. But this week’s headlines prompt memories of the last time a Farage-led party won a sizeable number of seats in a British parliament. Back in 2016, a month before Brexit, Ukip managed to take 7 of the 60 seats then available in the Welsh Assembly elections. That group quickly descended into farce and factionalism, with multiple leaders and mass departures, culminating in the subsequent election result where the party failed to retain a single seat. Reform is a bigger, more professional beast than Ukip. But there is no denying that Dan Thomas is a significant loss. He and Malcolm Offord in Scotland were seen as dependable lieutenants by Farage, who chose his Welsh leader from a shortlist of four earlier this year. Now the question comes as to who will replace him.

Two names are doing the rounds: Helen Jenner, the current deputy, and James Evans, one of the two incumbent Tories who defected before the election. Jenner is Kipper royalty: a long-marcher whose husband is a good friend of Nigel Farage. Likeable and modest, she was working as a school teacher just weeks before being selected for the Senedd. Evans is a former councillor, who worked on his family farm before becoming a Senedd in 2021. He is experienced and a good communicator but has already pledged to stand down at the next election. Yet Monday’s meeting between the nationalist First Ministers of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland could offer an opening. A staunch unionist, the serious prospect of secession could convince him to rethink his decision. One MS claims that ‘more than half’ of the Senedd group want Evans to stand. This being Reform, a deal could well be on the cards to avoid a potentially damaging split.

Cooper-Lesadd is an interesting case: she only joined Reform in January, having failed to be elected as a Tory candidate. She stood out in the Senedd for her constant focus on the care system, having grown up in it herself. That marked her out in a party where the likes of Joe Martin and Cai Parry-Jones have made names for themselves by focusing respectively on the more traditional right-wing themes of migration and waste. Crossing from Reform to Plaid Cymru is, frankly, an extraordinary move, akin to Natalie Elphicke defecting from the Tories to Labour. Kemi Badenoch has been quick to jump on the defection as proof that Reform attracts ‘very problematic people.’

It is no surprise therefore that there is significant anger within Reform, with Matt MacKinnon, the party’s director of external affairs, writing a lacerating response on X. He calls her ‘the worst of our politics’ and accuses her of having ‘lied to and manipulated assessors’ to secure her selection. Indeed Cooper-Lesadd’s defection will shine a spotlight on the process by which she was chosen. As one veteran Reformer points out, ‘Sarah was parachuted in’ over the longtime Brexiteer Caroline Jones, who bitterly resented the results of the selection process. ‘Can we seriously consider circumstances where Jones would be defecting to Plaid, months after being elected?’ he says.