Labour faces extinction in Wales – in a sign of what lies ahead for Starmer ...Middle East

In a warehouse on the outskirts of Cardiff, the Welsh First Minister Eluned Morgan is inspecting a hyper-realistic prosthetic corpse.

At the Real SFX studio – a special effects company which has provided the magic for shows including Doctor Who, Peaky Blinders and Sherlock – there is no shortage of on-the-nose metaphors for the plight of Welsh Labour, which one recent poll put on just 10 per cent.

As well as the corpse, there’s the life-size dead polar bear (from His Dark Materials, another Real SFX’s project) and the giant, roaring head of a Tyrannosaurus rex.

For the mischievously inclined, the jokes about a mighty beast – which was once lord of all it surveyed, but now threatened with extinction – write themselves.

There can be no doubt that Welsh Labour is fighting for its political survival. The party which has run the Welsh Government since the dawn of devolution in 1999 is adrift of Plaid Cymru and Reform UK in the polls for the Senedd election on 7 May. One poll even put Labour behind the Greens, in joint fourth-place with the Tories.  

For Morgan, who has been leader of Welsh Labour and First Minister since August 2024, it’s a matter of personal survival too, with some pollsters suggesting she is at risk of losing her own seat of Ceredigion Penfro in west Wales.

But for someone under immense pressure, Morgan still seems to be enjoying herself. On her visit to Real SFX – where Welsh Labour is trumpeting the delivery of 100,000 apprenticeships over the last five years – she talks animatedly to staff and gets stuck in to the arranged activities.

‘I want to blow something up’

She shatters a sugarglass prop bottle over the studio director’s head – with perhaps a little more enthusiasm than he was expecting – and poses with apprentices under a blizzard of fake snow. When she’s offered the opportunity to detonate a controlled explosion, her eyes light up.

“I definitely want to blow something up,” she says, before jokingly name-checking Nigel Farage. On the day of Morgan’s visit, Farage happens to be just up the M4 in Newport, unveiling Reform’s Welsh leader, Dan Thomas.

Once the pyrotechnics and dry ice are finished with, Morgan sits down with The i Paper in a relatively tranquil corner of the warehouse. Cup of tea in hand, she is frank about the almighty electoral task she is facing.

‘There is anger in our communities’

“Things are challenging for us, but I think that the electorate is very volatile. It looks very unsettled in terms of where people will eventually land,” she says.

“There’s clearly a bit of anger in our communities. I think we’ve got to recognise that people are struggling, and the danger is that people may want to ‘send a message’. I hope they won’t.”

And to whom might Welsh voters wish to send a message? Morgan confirms she’s talking about Sir Keir Starmer’s government in Westminster.

For months, the fates of Morgan and Starmer have appeared inextricably linked. Until about spring last year, Welsh Labour generally held a slender lead in Senedd opinion polls. Since then, Starmer’s unpopularity seems to have weighed on the party’s support. (A similar trend has been witnessed in Scotland, where support for Scottish Labour has also slumped – though not as precipitously as in Wales.)

The connection is a two-way street, with many pundits predicting that if Morgan loses Labour’s Welsh heartlands in May, it could prove politically fatal for Starmer.

When asked whether discontent with decisions taken in London has indeed depressed support, Morgan does not demur. “It’s going to impact us in some way,” she says. “But I do hope that what people will do is to recognise the risk of moving away from Welsh Labour. And you know, we are a different brand. We have got a different approach.”

For Morgan, managing the relationship with Starmer and UK Labour is a balancing act. Clearly, it would not make political sense to hug close a Prime Minister who has become so deeply unpopular (a poll by YouGov last month gave him a net favourability rating of -57 per cent, equalling Rishi Sunak’s lowest point as prime minister). But neither would it be credible for Morgan to denounce him.

That balancing act has become even more difficult in recent weeks because of the outrage over Starmer’s decision to appoint Lord Mandelson US Ambassador when he was aware of his ongoing friendship with Jeffrey Epstein after the paedophile financier was convicted.

‘Appalled’ by Mandelson’s behaviour

Morgan says she is “appalled” by the revelations about Mandelson’s behaviour exposed in the Epstein files and “certainly wouldn’t have appointed him”. But when asked whether she agrees with the handful of Labour backbenchers who have called for Starmer to go, she answers by arguing that the Prime Minister has helped to unlock record public investment for Wales.

That’s how she walks the tightrope – depicting relations with Starmer’s government as almost transactional, while arguing for Welsh Labour’s distinct identity, which she describes as “left of centre”.

“We were clear when the winter fuel allowance was introduced that we didn’t think that was the right thing to do. We were clear when the benefits reforms were proposed that we didn’t think that was a good idea. We were consistent when it came to the two-child benefit cap, we were opposed to that under the Tories, and we remained opposed to that under Labour.”

In the Senedd elections, Morgan is facing a pincer movement. On the right, Labour is being squeezed by Reform. The First Minister is contemptuous of Farage’s choice of Thomas for his Welsh leader. Unknown to Welsh politicos, Thomas is the former Conservative leader of Barnet Council and was until the end of last year still a councillor in the north London borough.

For Morgan, the salient fact is that he’s “yet another Tory defecting to Reform”.

She says she had “never heard” of Thomas before Friday morning. “None of these people [in Reform] have any leadership skills… There’s a real danger that £26bn worth of public services could be put into the hands of people who have literally no experience of running anything.”

While Reform are generating a lot of the media interest – particularly in England – the more dangerous threat arguably comes from the pincer on Labour’s left – Plaid. Opinion polls suggest the Welsh nationalist party has opened up clear water on its rivals, and it is the current bookies’ favourite to win most Senedd seats.

The threat from Plaid

In October’s Caerphilly Senedd by-election – where Labour lost the seat after falling to a disastrous 11 per cent – Plaid seemingly won by wresting the mantle of the progressive party best placed to beat Reform.

If a similar dynamic unfolds in May, it could be fatal for Labour. “We need to convince people not to peel off from Labour to Plaid,” she says.

Morgan talks up Plaid’s nationalist aspirations. Her fear, she explains, is that they would spend their time “pushing for constitutional reform on a road to independence, rather than focusing on the services that people rely on every day”, she says.

Welsh independence does not appear an imminent prospect. Polls suggest the unionist side has a 20-point plus lead, and Plaid’s leader Rhun ap Iorwerth has ruled out a referendum in the next five years if he is First Minister. But Morgan argues that if he can cobble a majority together with the pro-independence Greens, he might not be able to resist the temptation.

Beyond the constitutional debate, she argues that Plaid – which has strong farming roots – is ambivalent about clean energy infrastructure like solar panels in the countryside and has tried to block proposals to stop agricultural pollution flowing into rivers.

In the past, Labour has governed in Wales with Plaid’s support. No party has ever held an outright majority in the Senedd, and in May this will become even less likely due to the introduction of a more proportional electoral system. If Labour does come behind Plaid and Reform, it is possible that Morgan’s party could still have the votes to determine which appoints the First Minister.

Asked which she would prefer, she plays a straightish bat: “Clearly I wouldn’t go anywhere near Reform. But there is no way that I am negotiating or even considering what might happen after the election.”

A short time ago, the idea of a Labour wipeout in Wales was unthinkable. Welsh Labour has been in power for 26 years – the longest winning streak of any political party in the world. As well as its six Senedd victories, Labour has had the most Westminster seats in Wales in every election for more than a century.

But as the Labour prime minister James Callaghan observed in 1979, sometimes there is a once-in-a-generation “sea-change” in politics. “It then does not matter what you say or what you do,” he said. “There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of.”

‘A very volatile world’

Will Labour be swept away by a sea-change in May, and will Morgan go down in history as the Labour First Minister who finally lost Wales? One can readily imagine newspaper columnists breaking out hyperbolic comparisons to Lord North and the American colonies. How does she cope with the weight of Labour’s history in Wales, and that colossal pressure to maintain the winning streak?

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She answers levelly: “I was intensely aware when I took over as First Minister that we’d be defending 26 years in government, and every time you win, it becomes more difficult to win the time after…

“But you know, things happen in politics. We are in a very volatile world.”

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