Newsletter #59: Starmer's grooming gang enquiry at risk of collapse

PLUS: Reform loses in Caerphilly, riots in Ireland, and Labour’s tax raid on lawyers and accountants

Good morning.

This week, we discuss Reform’s failure in the Caerphilly by-election, rioting in Ireland, the collapse of Starmer’s grooming gangs inquiry, and a rumoured tax raid on lawyers and accountants.

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This newsletter’s agenda: Reform loses Caerphilly by-election (paid); Starmer’s grooming gang enquiry at risk of collapse (paid); Another round of protests in Ireland amid mass vote spoiling in Presidential Election (paid); Rachel Reeves plans tax raid on high-paid lawyers and accountants — Labour-voting GPs likely to be relieved (paid).

Reform loses Caerphilly by-election

On Thursday, Reform suffered a somewhat unexpected defeat in the Caerphilly by-election to the Welsh Parliament. Whilst polling is always unreliable for such small contests (total turnout was less than 32,000), what modelling was available suggested that Llyr Powell (the Reform candidate and long-time Farage ally) would secure the seat by a slim margin. In reality, the total collapse of the Labour vote, which fell from 46% in 2021 to only 11% in 2025, enabled Plaid Cymru to claim victory with 47% of the vote (and a 3,843-vote majority) from a thirteen-time candidate in a town that has been solidly Labour since the Westminster constituency’s creation in 1918. Labour’s defeat here means that it no longer has a majority in the Welsh Assembly even with the support of the Liberal Democrats. Reform won an impressive 36% of the vote, but fell well short of Plaid; meanwhile, the Tories were virtually annihilated, falling to just 2%, in yet another humiliation for Kemi Badenoch.

The defeat will be lauded by much of the commentariat as a turning point in the Left’s thus far unsuccessful efforts to quell Reform’s seemingly unstoppable rise. Already, much has been made of Thursday’s result, with figures across the Left claiming it as ‘proof’ that Reform has hit a ceiling and, even more importantly, that there remains a strong appetite among the electorate for progressive politics despite the unpopularity of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. In this reading, a more left-wing party won in a rejection of Starmer’s ‘Tory lite’ approach.

Despite having had a gut feeling that Reform would not be able to make it over the line in Caerphilly, seeing the result when it first came out was a bit of a sting. Nevertheless, it’s important not to be particularly disheartened. The Left’s complacency in the face of overwhelming popular discontent is our strongest asset, and we should remain focused and committed whilst learning the appropriate lessons from the failure. The ‘progressive alliance’ approach is more than possible for Reform to undo with clever campaigning.

Given a diverse opposition, Reform must take great care to choose the correct strategy in each individual constituency. Throughout this election, the party’s primary target in their campaign was Labour — understandable, given their incumbency in all three of Caerphilly, Cardiff, and Westminster, and the widespread disillusionment of their voter base. Reform’s online communications centred around ‘ending 100 years of Labour rule in Caerphilly’, and emphasising that ‘lifelong Labour voters are making the switch to Reform’. On polling day alone, the Reform X account made nine posts referencing Labour, and only one mentioning Plaid (and even then, only by lumping them in with Labour).

In hindsight, dedicating only half a tweet to the party which would ultimately beat you seems foolish. No less than Farage himself said less than a week before the by-election that he expected the election to be a ‘two-horse race between Reform UK and Plaid Cymru’. Given Labour’s bad polling nationally and the string of scandals that have hit Welsh Labour in particular over the past few years, this was not exactly a remarkable prediction. Whilst winning over Labour voters would always have been a core part of the strategy, asking voters to ‘send a message’ to Keir Starmer is not enough when they have easy access to an alternative party which also provides a chance to ‘send a message’, at least in their own estimation.

As Labour loses support to other left-wing parties, Reform will increasingly be opposing a wider left-wing (or even simply anti-Reform) coalition that coalesces highly tactically around a single party based on local conditions, rather than a true single-party force. Much of Plaid’s vote in Caerphilly was lent simply to stop Reform, and it is not implausible that a similar tactic will be deployed nationally, whether officially organised or not. In such a situation, it is imperative that Reform learn to structure their messaging specifically to break apart that tactical coalition and keep the vote against them split. Plaid have provided plenty of material through the years which Reform could have used to attack them and their far-left positions.

A Plaid campaign advert featuring a party member who was subsequently suspended for antisemitism.

A substantial minority of Plaid’s votes in Caerphilly appear to have come from former Conservatives, keen to keep Reform out of office and reassured by Plaid’s supposedly 'nationalist’ stance, which is seen as vaguely right-wing. Even more Plaid voters may have been dissatisfied, culturally right-leaning Labour voters who would have been reassured by Plaid for similar reasons: after all, as a very useful article notes, one voter, opposed to illegal immigration, even claimed that Plaid ‘put the Welsh first’. An analogy can be drawn with the fact that relatively few Liberal Democrat voters in England know how left-wing that party really is.

Preventing this coalition from forming by tying Plaid to the worst excesses of left-wing politics should have been the top priority. This shouldn’t have been difficult: Plaid are far more extreme than Labour on virtually every issue, and Reform should have had adverts running constantly with clips of Plaid’s leader Rhun Ap Llowerth declaring that ‘there is no such thing as illegal immigration’ throughout the election. By focusing solely on Labour merely because they are the incumbents, Reform will continue to allow opposition to coalesce around whichever alternative has the strongest chance locally, which will often not be Labour given current polling. Tactical voting requires tactical campaigning.

While adjusting strategy in the ways described above will be important for Reform in the coming months and years, it’s important not to overstate the significance of this result. Reform would likely have won the seat were it not for the unusually high turnout created by months of media attention on the race. Although Reform will inevitably have to win traditionally left-leaning constituencies to obtain a majority, the fact that Caerphilly is even in play is a sign of Reform’s unprecedented strength.

Reform will have another chance to show their support in Wales next May, when the entire Welsh Parliament will be up for election. If current polling is at all to be believed, I expect that result will be far less disappointing.

—WolfOfClapham Contributor, Pimlico Journal

Starmer’s grooming gang enquiry at risk of collapse