The Tories are on the brink of annihilation in Wales – and it holds a lesson for Westminster politicians

The Guardian

5 days ago

By any measure, Kemi Badenoch's leadership of the Conservative party is not in a good place. In the last few months alone, she has been told 'her days are numbered', that she is in 'Liz Truss territory' and that she is 'hitting a new record low'. This is not a hostile audience. These criticisms come from the Telegraph, the Spectator and the Daily Express, outlets that have traditionally turned a blind eye to the most egregious Conservative leadership failings, like a blinkered parent who refuses to accept the repeated reports from teachers that their child is a bully.
It's clear that what Badenoch is doing is not working. She needs to change course, not just for her own sake, but for the continued existence of her party as a political entity. In case this isn't obvious to her already (just 10% of people in the UK see her as a PM in waiting), there is a really handy example of what will happen to the Conservative party if it keeps being a Reform tribute act – the Welsh Conservative party.
If you haven't paid any attention to the Welsh Conservative party, don't blame yourself, because hardly anyone in Wales has either. I have had the privilege of reporting on the Welsh Tories for a decade and they are the embodiment of all the challenges and failings of the current UK party. And when I say 'privilege', I mean it. Journalistically, it has been like shooting fish in a barrel, such is the level of incompetence exhibited by the Welsh Conservatives. But a gain for the humble hack is a loss for the people of Wales.
Since devolution, Wales has been desperate for a sensible centre-right alternative that could genuinely challenge Welsh Labour, whose record is more patchy than Boris Johnson's account of Partygate. Instead, the people of Cymru have been condemned to a Welsh Conservative party that has preferred to dabble in Nigel Farage cosplay rather than genuine opposition. A party that could soon be all but wiped out in Wales.
So what lessons can Badenoch learn from the situation her colleagues find themselves in across Offa's Dyke? Well, the first concerns demographics. The Welsh Conservative party is literally dying out. According to a study by Cardiff University's Wales Governance Centre, in 2024 fewer than 10% of people aged under 65 in Wales voted for the Conservatives. In fact, 10% of the party's 2019 voters had passed away by the time of the 2024 election (the figure for Labour was 3%). If this trend continues, 40% of Tory voters in Cymru will have died by the next election.
But surely these voters are being replaced? Well, no. If you want to see how hard the Welsh Conservatives are finding it to recruit younger people, then look no further than a fringe meeting that was held at their party conference in May. I remember looking through the programme and seeing that an event by the Welsh Young Conservatives was discussing how to attract more young people. They defined 'young' as under 45.
That same conference underlined another problem: that the Conservatives scream incompetence right now. For one thing, Badenoch herself began her speech by saying how 'wonderful' it was 'to meet so many MSPs'. In Wales we have MSs (Senedd members); not MSPs (members of the Scottish parliament). The auto captions all over the hall also wrote 'whales' rather than 'Wales' throughout all of the speeches. And the lack of compassion and hope from the current Conservative party was hilariously encapsulated in the subtitles to the speech of Darren Millar, the Welsh Tory leader in the Senedd, which translated 'We are pro-roads, not just cycle paths' into 'We are pro-roads, not just psychopaths'.
It also doesn't help that the Conservatives can't agree about who their Welsh leader is. In the constitution of the Conservative party, Badenoch is technically the leader of the Welsh Conservatives. However, Mims Davies (an MP in Sussex) is the leader of the Welsh Conservatives in Westminster, and Millar is the leader of the Welsh Conservatives in the Senedd. But if we accept that, for all intents and purposes, Millar is the leader in Wales (given he is the only one actually in Wales), we can see how his failure of leadership (and the failures of his predecessors) offer Badenoch a stark warning.
The lesson here is that trying to mirror Reform is a losing play. Millar has continued the strategy put in place by his predecessor, Andrew RT Davies, and tried to be more Farage than Farage himself in rhetoric. Davies was investigated by the Welsh parliament's standards commissioner after he told GB News: 'Welsh Labour are dishing out £1,600 to anyone who wants to rock up and claim they are crossing the Channel illegally.' To be clear, the figure he was referring to was the Welsh government's basic income pilot, which will give £1,600 a month to care leavers and included about a dozen migrant children who came to the UK alone with no family.
The Welsh Tories also show what happens when you fail to put forward any credible plans for actually governing the country. Regarding the biggest challenge facing Wales, which is the NHS, the Welsh Conservatives issued a statement saying they would 'properly fund the health service'. When asked where the money would come from, they listed a string of 'Labour vanity projects' which they would cut. Unfortunately, some of these ended in 2003.
In the Senedd right now, the Welsh Conservatives are the official opposition. They constitute 15 of the 60 members (25%). Polling suggests that in the Welsh election next year they will receive between 10% and 13% of the vote. The electoral system in Wales means that any party that dips under 12% could be totally wiped out. An MRP poll in May suggested that they could have as few as three seats (and this is after the Senedd will have expanded to 96 members).
These projections could be Badenoch's Welsh canary in the coalmine. I suspect she will simply say the canary wasn't determined enough, and keep on tunnelling.
Will Hayward is a Guardian columnist. He publishes a regular newsletter on Welsh politics and is the author of Independent Nation: Should Wales Leave the UK?