Death spiral? The state of Labour in Wales

Plus: the polling which shows how bad it really is

I live a forty minute walk from the Welsh border. Moel Famau - “Mother's Mound”, complete with crumbling Georgian tower at its tip - sits above a tranquil Clwydian range. From Chester, it's pretty as a picture.

But it's deceiving. It's Flintshire. And Denbighshire. And far from tranquil, the politicians holding the keys to these parts, Labour, Tory, Independent and all, look set for a rude awakening.

The North Welsh border very rarely votes Tory. For some time it's been reliably Labour. But in 2019 all went awry. Against the tide of Boris Johnson-branded Toryism, only Deeside stayed Labour. Wrexham, for the first time, was gone. Flint, further along the coast, was gone. Prestatyn, gone. Rhyl, gone. Leave-backing Britain wanted one thing doing, and got it.

Labour won it all back in the July General Election, but the days of Denbighshire being cushy caravan constituencies for aspiring parachutists or punch-ups from bus tours (RIP John) is ancient history now.

Because only today, a mere year into the new Labour government, polls paint a sore picture for its Welsh equivalents.

Wales, once the bedrock of continuity Labourism - the only constituent nation to have a government of the red variety since 1999 - the polls toll thus: chaos is coming.

The Senedd elections are now under ten months away. And the Welsh government's decision to abandon its half-way house system of part-First Past The Post and part-proportional for full-throated proportionalism at the next election will mark the death of majority party governments.

Without fail Labour has been winning 50 per cent of the seats up in the Senedd, give or take. First Past The Post has given them the whip hand in Wales for almost three decades.

The chance of coming anywhere close to that today stands south of zero.

Today the polls have them on course to lose half of their representation in the Senedd. Electoral change combined with fluctuating, low enthusiasm-driven polls makes unpleasant reading for our new incumbents. Labour isn't guaranteed to be top of the charts anywhere. Reform is polling 28 per cent in Wales right now. They're leading in North Wales. And with the new election system, it'd mean winning 28 seats in the Senedd.

The Tories, already suffering from Welsh defections to Reform, would come in as the humiliating "also-rans" of the right with 15 seats.

Together they'd be six seats short of running Wales - a statistic alien to everything Wales has voted for since the advent of devolution in 1999.

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But the writing has been on the wall for quite some time now.

Llanelli, in Carmarthenshire is one such case study. Llanelli was a constituency that the Tories weren't far off winning at the 2019 GE. The Labour incumbent Nia Griffith clung on there with 39 per cent to the Conservative candidate's 31 per cent. The then Brexit Party candidate polled nine per cent. Okay. Fine.

Last year Labour fell eight points in the seat. And the combined Conservative-Reform share of the vote was... virtually the same on 2019. The only difference? Reform won 28 per cent. The Tories won 11 per cent.

It's the realignment of the right. What we're on course to see in Wales is a continuation of that, a mothballing of the Tory vote at the hands of Reform, and then some from depressed and dissipating former Labour supporters.

The result? A humbled Tory party, and an insurgent Reform grouping. To command the confidence of the Senedd and form an administration, you need 49 seats.

For a combined Ref-Con coalition to be on course for 43, six short is... new, to say the least. Britain Predicts modelling was an error margin from a Reform win in Runcorn. We said a Labour hold by less than a hundred votes. The result was a Reform win by six. Today we are an error margin from the first right-wing Welsh government in history.

And here's why it's happening.

Wales is meant to be bedrock Labourism. Whereas it was a given that Labour would struggle in England in bad years, it was hoped - and often proven - that it would get a fairer hearing in Wales.

The finding I'm sending you today tells the following: not anymore.

Pollster More in Common has done some Welsh polling, and asked the same questions they asked of voters across the UK. Compare the Welsh poll with their UK poll - readjusted by us to show only English voters - and you find something remarkable, and alien to any old Labour hat.

Perceptions towards Labour in Wales today are as bad as they are towards Labour in England, if not worse.

That's new. That's not normal. It's not "Labour as unpopular in Liverpool as in... Lincolnshire", but you get the picture. The Prime Minister's own ratings are worse in Wales than they are in England.

The Labour brand is in the toilet. Starmer's is worse. There's no other way to go about it. Eluned Morgan, the Welsh First Minister, who more than half of Welsh voters don’t even know what to think of, has better net favourables than Starmer.

But what does all this mean? Simply, it makes for unenthused supporters. Unenthused turnout. Victory for those with fire in their bellies.

And, so far, the only fire in town is Reform's. And, though to a lesser extent, Plaid’s.

Nine months to go. Will it last?