Reform candidate Llŷr Powell looks on during the count at Caerphilly Leisure Centre. After a surge in turnout and tactical voting, the seat was won by Plaid Cymru’s Lindsay Whittle.
Photograph: Matthew Horwood/Getty
On the trail of Moscow gold, a Russian spy and Nigel Farage, I go to the Reform Party HQ in Caerphilly. They slam the door in my face.
Welcome to Reform. To the left is a larger-than-life photo of the Great Nige, opposite him a snap of L r Powell, Reform’s candidate in the pivotal by-election for the Welsh Senedd. The door opens a smidge and the security man asks what is my business. “John Sweeney from the Nerve. I am trying to find the Reform candidate.”
The door closes, a second time.
Llŷr means “The Sea” and is pronounced a bit like “Clear” but with a very Welsh something at the back of your throat. I’m not the only Englishman who has trouble getting it right. Word is that Farage calls him “Welsh Dave”.
The door re-opens and a press officer tells me that the candidate is “not doing Press” until the count. In Reform Caerphilly, it’s democracy, Jim, but not as we know it.
Out on the high street, opposite Reform HQ, my cameraman and I start vox-popping the punters: “Reform”, “Reform”, “Reform”. “All these immigrants coming in, no, thank you,” “stop the illegal immigrants. That’s the big thing with me, I want it stopped, so that the money will stay in this country and not go to foreigners.”
Reform. Reform. Reform. The only other game in town is Plaid Cymru, and when I catch up with that party’s candidate, Lindsay Whittle, our conversation is interrupted by a succession of drivers, winding down their windows and shouting: “Stop the Boats!”
Our Great British democracy is reduced to three-word slogans. Knowing what happened after “Taking Back Control” I want to chase after the Reform car people and yell: “Fuck the KGB!” but at 67, I’m getting too old to bark at passing traffic and, besides, I’ve got a gammy leg. Still, it’s ever so tempting.
Plaid’s gander is up. Rather than slamming the door in my face, the people in their office pelted me with fancy homemade cakes. Lindsay Whittle, the Plaid Cymru champion, is Wales in the flesh: a barrel of a man, with a great singing voice and a lust for life and Caerphilly. We meet in Tommy Cooper walk, just down from the statue of Caerphilly’s most famous son and across the way from Caerphilly Castle, built by a Norman lackey to finish off a free and independent Wales. That died in 1282 but Whittle is fighting hard for a replay.
I put it to Whittle that it feels like Tommy Cooper’s ghost has done a magic trick because he’s disappeared the Reform candidate. “Well, I understand from many journalists that some candidates are not doing interviews at all, that's a little bit regressive. You really need to be getting your message across to the public. This is what you’re standing for and how you hope to represent them. So at any opportunity, I’ll talk to anyone.”
What’s happened to the Labour vote?
“The Labour vote has totally disappeared. It’s not as if you’ve pulled the plug out of the bath water. It’s as if the entire bath has collapsed. And I have never, ever seen a vote disappear. I have been working this constituency, man and boy, for 50 years, and I can assure you that the Labour Party are going to be lucky to come third. I’m a local, born and brought up in this town. I played in this castle behind me when I was a boy. I’ve worked in this town making crash helmets in a factory. I’ve been unemployed in this town when Thatcher closed the foundry. I have lived and breathed this town.” Whittle says that even Labour Party members are going to vote for him: “they’ve told me, never mind the poster in the window, I’m voting for you.”
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage (left) with his party's candidate, Llyr Powell, standing in
front of a statue of local hero Tommy Cooper while campaigning in Caerphilly, 10 October.
Photograph: Ben Birchall/ Getty
Is the Russian spy story cutting through on the doorstep? “It hasn’t come up too much on the doorstep, if I’m being honest with you, because Llŷr Powell has told people that he was not employed at the time and he knows nothing. So I will accept people at their word. People are talking to me about the NHS, about the closure of local surgeries, five libraries in the constituency, one swimming pool, two museums. It’s local services that people are mainly concerned with.”
What’s Reform running on? “If you listen to people in the traffic behind us, people often shout, ‘Stop the boats!’ Well, the Senedd cannot stop the boats. I would much rather them shout, ‘Employ more doctors! Train more nurses! Pay teachers more! Get quality jobs!’ Those are the three words I want people to shout.”
When the Russians are up to no good, you should always look out for what the Ukrainians are up to. Yuliia Bond arrived in Caerphilly from Ukraine in 2022. Last week, a few days before polling day, she posted on Facebook how a fellow refugee, Olena, reacted to a canvasser from the Reform Party. “He turns up all smiles, holding leaflets like he’s about to save democracy. ‘Good afternoon!’ he says proudly. ‘I’m from the Reform Party – can we count on your support?’ Olena, ever polite, smiles and replies: ‘Oh, really? You mean the party that wants to scrap the Nation of Sanctuary scheme that actually helped people like me when I came to Wales?’
“He looks confused. She calmly says: ‘I’m Ukrainian.’ ‘Oh, no – the Nation of Sanctuary programme is only for asylum seekers,’ he says confidently. Olena blinks. ‘Actually, no – it’s mainly for Ukrainians. 85% of the funding was used for Ukrainians. That’s literally my scheme.’ He stammered: ‘Uh … I don’t really know about that. I think maybe we made a petition against this scheme?’ Olena raised an eyebrow. ‘So you’re knocking on doors,’ she says, ‘but don’t even know your own policies?’ He laughed nervously, mumbling something about ‘just helping the campaign,’ clutching his leaflets like a life raft. Then Olena delivered the knockout line: ‘That’s OK. I do know – and we Ukrainians can vote in local elections now.’”
The Labour Party in its South Wales citadel is dead. Leastways, only one voter told us that he would be voting for the party that has dominated this part of the world for a century and the opinion polls prior to the byelection placed Reform first, Plaid second and put Labour on 12%. If Labour is defunct, the Tories are extinct.
Reform’s messiah-in-tweeds, Nigel Farage, is oh-so-very English, which makes his party’s grip on the Valleys bewildering, all the more so because of the man who connects the Russian spy and his dirty roubles with “Welsh Dave” Powell is Nathan Gill. The former MEP has pleaded guilty to eight counts of taking bribes from the Kremlin’s secret agent, Oleh Voloshyn, and will be sentenced next month.
Happy to meet the press: in a screenshot from his film John Sweeney (left) interviews winning candidate Plaid Cymru’s Lindsay Whittle
Traitor Gill and I have history. In 2017, I interviewed him for BBC Newsnight when he and former Tory MP turned UKIP politician, Neil Hamilton were at war over the poor state of UKIP. To be frank, I have been an enemy of Hamilton, and everything he stands for, for decades. The great battle between him, his wife Christine and my hero Martin Bell for the affections of the voters of Tatton in the 1997 general election was the subject of my book, Purple Homicide. Christine – the self-styled Great British Battleaxe – charmed us all after she shooed away a BBC Radio car with a massive aerial extension: “Get that bloody great penis thing away from my hedge.” But Hamilton came across as a cad and a bounder.
Two decades on, nothing much had changed. To be fair, Hamilton had a cracking line on Farage (nicked from Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice): “he wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral.” Back in 2017, I had some sympathy for Gill in his spat with Hamilton. It turns out that shortly after I interviewed him, Gill started to gorge himself on Moscow gold. I shall pay tribute to Hamilton by buying him, the next time our paths cross, a small glass of dry sherry. And the other thing: I feel that Gill betrayed not just his country but me, personally, and I will not stop digging until Reform comes clean about its traitor.
Gill was bribed by the men with snow on their boots to bad-mouth the Ukrainians in the European parliament while Farage produced pretty much the same pro-Kremlin death cult talking points for free. Challenged about his relationship with Gill, Farage told reporters in Caerphilly on a recent trip: “I’d known this person for a very long time, I knew him in the European Parliament in the UKIP days to be a God-fearing Christian, somebody that you would think was the least corruptible person that you would know.”
Brexit Party candidate Nathan Gill (left) with Llŷr Powell after the party won the most votes in May 2019 in Haverfordwest, Wales. Photo by Matthew Horwood/ Getty
History does not repeat. But one should always listen for echo. Asked if Farage knew about Gill making pro-Kremlin statements, Farage said: “I didn’t know anything about it. All I knew was that he’d been to Ukraine. He said: ‘We’re going on a visit to Ukraine, do you want to come?’. I said: ‘You’re off your rocker, this is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, you must be mad.’ And I told him not to go. He defied me and went. I was completely unaware of any statements that he made.” What is striking about Farage’s reply is that he blames Gill’s fall from grace to a trip to Ukraine, ignoring the fact that Voloshyn was a Russian spy (he fled to Belarus just before the big war started and is now in Russia).
Reform has not been open and transparent about Gill’s treachery. The Russian intelligence service knows more about this relationship than the voters of Caerphilly. But, on the eve of polling day, in terms of voices and posters, Reform seems like a near-certain winner.
I race up and down the length of the constituency, hunting the Reform candidate in hiding. Plaid Cymru tell us he’s been spotted in Bargoed, so we zoom there. No candidate, but a beautiful sculpture of three miners stands in the town centre, a memory in slate to a dead industry.
When Caerphilly came to vote, that message hit home. Plaid knock Reform into a cocked hat, taking 47% of the vote and sending two messages to the rest of the United Kingdom, the first being that in a first-past-the-post system, everyone must vote tactically to keep Reform out, and the second?
That would be: Fuck the KGB!
John Sweeney is a journalist who has won awards for his work both in print and broadcasting including the Paul Foot Award in 2005. His most recent work includes the book Murder in the Gulag (2024) and the podcast Hunting Ghislaine
Film made by John Lubbock & Daisy Steinhardt. Additional research: Charlie Young