Llŷr Powell hopes to be Reform UK’s first elected Senedd member
Reform UK candidate Llyr Powell(Image: John Myers)
Your lads’ holiday to Magaluf being kyboshed because you worked too much overtime is an unusual reason to enter politics. In fact of all the people I’ve ever asked how they’ve ended up in politics it’s the first time that someone has ever told me it was because of an EU working directive.
The story, as Llŷr Powell tells it, is that after leaving school at 16 he was working in Pontardawe leisure centre doing a range of jobs – everything from setting up the gyms for classes to parties and cleaning. Around the time he turned 18 he wanted to go on his first holiday with friends to Magaluf and asked to work extra hours.
By doing so, he not only caused issues with the local union and lost the shifts he needed but HMRC contacted him and said he would get the money back for that holiday the following April – long after the summer sun had been and gone. For our free daily briefing on the biggest issues facing the nation, sign up to the Wales Matters newsletter here
“That made me a bit curious and I started looking into different politics and then I saw a chap on YouTube who I thought was hilarious.,” said Mr Powell. “Sometimes he liked to throw a few comments around at the EU and questioned different things.
“He was talking about tax levels and it really intrigued me. So I went to see him live in the Liberty Stadium in Swansea and that man was Nigel Farage.” At that point Mr Farage, now an MP, was campaigning for the 2014 European elections.
Fast forward 11 years and the pair’s journey remains intertwined. Now Mr Powell hopes to become the next Senedd member for Caerphilly and, in turn, the first elected Senedd politician for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
He admits he wasn’t politically minded before that event in Swansea and he is the first in his family to go into politics since his great-grandfather who knocked doors for Labour. Diagnosed dyslexic he admits he has faced his academic challenges and said while his teachers would likely have described him as “a little opinionated” not even his oldest friends would have predicted a career in politics.
Yet within months of seeing Mr Farage speak in Swansea he ended up becoming a caseworker for then Welsh MEP Nathan Gill.
The granular details of a 30-year-old political hopeful’s CV may not usually be the main topic of an interview but they are when your first boss has recently admitted taking bribes to make favourable statements about Russia and your opponents have made it a central tenet of their campaign against you.
Asked the dates he was working for the now-disgraced former politician he said it “varies”. “Other opportunities came up where I would be on secondment. So I did spend some time sort of in Brussels for a couple of weeks on a training programme with one of the parliamentary programmes there to learn more about the European Parliament.
“I was on and off contracts. Then I went to work for the Policy Development Group in 2015, so I was doing stuff when Mark Reckless and Douglas Carswell were, so I spent a ton of time in Westminster and I got to meet them.
“Then I was on secondment [with Ukip] for the 2016 elections and I was doing all campaign work – more of my comms background.”
In 2016 he said he split from the Ukip Wales group. “I had my difficulties with them and I didn’t feel it was a home for me there,” he said. He joined the Conservatives, saying he wasn’t an active member but joined to vote in the leadership contest. “I probably felt politically homeless about then,” Mr Powell adds.
He cannot remember how long he was a Conservative party member, he said, but found his political home back with Mr Farage when in 2019 he joined the Brexit Party. That lasted until 2021 when he joined the Scouts in Wales, Llais, and charities doing communications consultancy, he said.
He said despite moving parties, and even away from Mr Farage, it was never personal towards his party leader.
He joined Reform UK due to frustration at Rishi Sunak’s government, initially taking two weeks’ leave to volunteer to get Mr Farage elected in Clacton in the 2024 general election. But at the end of that two weeks, as he returned to Cardiff on the train, he resigned his day jobs and was “fully committed” to taking a job in Reform UK’s headquarters.
He has never denied having worked for Mr Gill, nor under him in the party, but said his employment didn’t cross over with the date of the offences and added: “It’s not just that – I know absolutely nothing about it.
“I don’t think any member of staff who worked for other Senedd members who left in the darkness of night have to answer for that person’s behaviour considering they still working in the Senedd now.
“I don’t think people in the BBC have had to answer questions on what they knew about Huw Edwards. I don’t think even in your company with phone hacking scandals I don’t think you should be held responsible for.
Nigel Farage and Llŷr Powell walk through Caerphilly(Image: WalesOnline/Rob Browne)
“I had no power over these decisions at all. People seem to think I was all-powerful. I wasn’t – I was a case worker,” he said.
Asked when they last spoke, or if he had looked back at their last messages since his former boss pleaded guilty, he said: “No because you change phones.
“European phone… Nathan had a different number by the end. If I’m being totally honest with you I don’t know whether it was the Brexit night when we actually left [that we last spoke] and it was like a: ‘Can you believe this?’ I think that might have been a message.
“Mine and Nathan’s relationship was purely when he needed me in the sense of casework or press advice on Welsh-specific [matters] – that’s when I sort of excelled.
“In terms of his other engagements in the European Parliament I was never involved or when he was going abroad and stuff like that.”
Asked his reaction when he saw the charges his former boss was facing he said: “I found out through a journalist who rang me and I was in utter shock. I thought it couldn’t be true at the start – that was the first reaction.
“As I read the article I seemed to get like this real anger.
“Of course I was worried about a myself and my other colleagues that I worked with, who were good employees for Nathan, how he betrayed us. And then you feel: ‘What has he done to the voters’?
“I was asked the other day if I think Nathan’s a traitor. The only word I could have in my head was: ‘Yes he is’ by the very definition for me.
“There’s a lot of feelings, mixed emotions, in it and then I thought: ‘He’ll have his day in court and we’ll find out whether this is true or not.’
“There’s a lot of anger in me that he shouldn’t have had a plea deal and should feel the full weight of the law,” he said.
It is not an issue coming up on doorsteps ahead of the by-election, he said (we asked to join Reform UK on the doorsteps but were told that was not possible). “I’m only being asked about in terms of the press and if you find online trolls who just want to distract,” he said, although as we leave Rosita’s coffee shop and walk in the shadows of Caerphilly Castle I clock, and we walk over to, two homemade A4 posters on the back of the parking sign saying Mr Powell is “rotten to the core” and questioning his links to Gill.
“I’m asking people to give me a chance to prove that Reform is good here,” the candidate added.
Nigel Farage and Llyr Powell during a campaign visit in Caerphilly on Friday(Image: WalesOnline/Rob Browne)
“I’ve got six months to prove myself, if I am elected, and people have the opportunity to kick me out after if I’m bad.
“I think anyone with common sense who’s looked at this story and is open-minded will see that I had nothing to do with it. I’ve never had questions to answer outside of just political smear campaigns or what Labour is trying to insinuate,” he said.
During this campaign he said he has faced a “high number” of threats and as we walk back to his office after the interview there is a security guard outside.
He said Labour has “disappointed” him with a “smear fear campaign”. “They have tried to smear my name without any evidence of me doing anything wrong,” he said. He has issued a legal letter to Labour for ads which linked him with Russian President Putin.
He said he has never backed scrapping prescription charges, nor has his party, yet there have been attacks from Labour saying he has.
“This isn’t a battle of ideas and about what was best for Caerphilly,” he said. “I think it’s quite a sinister campaign they’ve run – and Plaid in other ways. They”ll accuse me of misinformation that if you were to sit down in the literature and we went through it I think you could see, quite frankly, who was putting out the misinformation.
“What’s upsetting the most to me was I was close to the Senedd member who was here before me and I used to have regular WhatsApp, DMs, and a bit of banter back and forth.
“But for me I can see that this campaign is one that he would have hated the most because the priority should be what’s important to the people here of Caerphilly and I think they’ve been forgotten in some of the smears that are coming out,” he said.
“I think what they’ve done to my name is despicable. I can’t believe a party would sink to that.
“I think the way they’ve smeared me – the threats that I’ve had on myself because of it.. I’ve had to keep my family at a safe distance,” he said, visibly affected by it. But he said seeing “the establishment” pull rank on him and the threats he’s faced make him more determined. “Do I have tough days? Yeah, absolutely, but I do feel more determined than ever that I know what I’m fighting for is right.”
From its detractors Reform UK faces other questions. Will it be a constructive force in the Senedd or be a repeat of the chaotic scenes Ukip MSs brought from 2016? What actually are its Welsh policies? And are they just the Conservatives Mark II?
Mr Powell said Reform UK has “several things in place” for its prospective new members including training. “We learnt a lot from going into Westminster,” he said. Reform UK in 2025 isn’t Ukip in 2016, he added. There is a “professionalism of the party” but also a shared objective – something he said Ukip didn’t have.
Llyr Powell in the centre of Caerphilly town centre(Image: John Myers)
“Ukip’s objective was to deliver on the referendum and leave the European Union and there were so many opinions and views being around It was never a consensus. It was very difficult.
“Reform is a different machine. It’s things we’ve learnt and people that are more united on the causes that we want to achieve. In Wales at the moment we’re talking a lot more devolved areas, there’s a lot more policy meetings taking place, and serious people like the former secretary of state for Wales [David Jones] who’s in those meetings as well.
“We have people who have played roles within devolved governments, different governments from civil service level, who are guiding us on what’s achievable and what is not.”
In terms of their representatives he said there were other senior Welsh Conservatives who tried to join Reform but were turned down.
“There’s a lot more people who try to come over that we didn’t let in from the Conservatives…. They can try to deny it but we’ve still got WhatsApp, we’ve still got conversations that took place, I’ve still got friends with receipts from the coffees that they sat down with. It’s complete lies.
“They did try to cross the floor to us and we didn’t want to do that.
“The reason we didn’t is because their values, we feel, didn’t meet ours. It felt like they only wanted to come to us for one reason – to save their own paycheck.
“That wasn’t acceptable to us,” he added.
He says Laura Anne Jones, the MS who defected to Reform UK, had “always been quite close philosophically with a Nigel Farage” as had renowned Brexiteer Mr Jones. “They’re very much Reformers at heart. They feel more aligned with our party as a whole,” he said.
“If you go to an average branch meeting it’s incredible the people we’ve got that have never been engaged in politics before who are first time out there.”
In terms of the Caerphilly campaign he said there are plenty of people who “don’t feel that Labour represents them anymore, or this area, in true Labour values”.
What does that mean, I ask. “The people they put up [for election] don’t sound like them. They haven’t shared the same experience as them.
“I don’t just talk about a zero hours contract because the unions paid us a lot of money to talk about it but I’ve actually worked on one – that was my bread and butter, that’s how I paid my bills. Yeah. My mother was a nurse in the NHS – I’ve seen the impact on her.
“You can a call me a son of devolution. I’ve gone through devolution all my education so I’ve seen it firsthand.
“I’ve heard Eluned Morgan talk about how Mark Drakeford and Rhodri Morgan were over her father’s house and these kitchen table conversations – that doesn’t appeal to people. The Labour Party movement was born out on these streets by real issues – that’s what we’re talking about. We’re willing to talk about healthcare. We don’t shut debate down because it might be a controversial topic. I don’t think we should demonise people for their views,” he said.
He has faced criticism for talking about immigration in an area where, according to the 2021 Census, foreign-born residents made up just 2.9% of Caerphilly’s population – 5,193 people out of 175,952.
When I asked him the issues coming up on the doorstep immigration was his first answer. Why not, I ask him, focus on area that the parliament you’re going to can do something about. “I am,” he counters. “My literature has been talking about the failure to upgrade Ysbyty Fawr. I am talking about the libraries. I am talking about local issues.
Llyr Powell denies any wrongdoing during his time working for Nathan Gill(Image: John Myers)
“This idea people seem to think the people in Caerphilly don’t leave Caerphilly ever and see migration in other places as well…Cardiff isn’t that far away. They can see the demographics change there. Here in Caerphilly itself on the high street you see a lot more Turkish barbers or vape shops,” he said.
“In Britain we had an immigration policy running between 30 to 40,000 a year. For years we had it like that and no-one seemed to see the impact massively of it. It was people coming in which we need.
“It was a sensible immigration level. Now we’re running into hundreds of thousands and that’s just the legal migration we’re talking about.
“I think what’s really angered people is they’ve shown frustration in a moderate way of just saying: ‘It is a big issue for us’ and the Tories did absolutely nothing about it after years of saying they would. They’ve now got a Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, who said that he would fix the problem.
“The boat crisis has increased and the level of migration is coming up,” he said. “Migration isn’t an answer for our economic troubles right now.”
He wants better training for young people. “There’s always this idea of importing more. Labour hasn’t set out to plan in Wales in terms of healthcare. We need more nurses and doctors. How are we going to train them? What do they do?
“They were celebrating the other day: ‘We’ve flown over to India – we’ve invited these doctors and nurses over here’. I’ve got no problem with these people directly. But the policy I find frustrating, and I think voters do, because what is Labour going to be doing about this gap that we’ve got? It’s constantly more and more but we’re never actually going at the root cause.”
He said there is a specific Welsh policy unit within Reform UK looking at policies ahead of May’s Senedd election, with the economy as a key area – creating jobs, taxes, helping local high streets and councils – but a second team looking at waste.
Asked what Reform UK’s health policy is he said: “There’s lots of areas I’m looking at right now. I’m not bringing out a manifesto in this by-election.
“I’m speaking to frontline workers to start with because the real problem I want to find out is: what challenges do people find getting into the service in whatever role that they’re doing> What are the barriers? What would incentivise them?” he said.
“In order to do all the things myself and the others want to do we’ve got to fund it. We’ve got to look where we want to scale in spending. We’ve got to settle on a budget.
“Plaid are going to say they’re going to stamp their feet until Keir Starmer gives them more. I don’t believe that.
“Rhun is going to say he’s going to blow the house down and huff and puff and he’s not going to get anywhere with that.
“The reality is we know how much money we’re allocated and, for me, it’s about how we best spend that money.”
“I’m confident with how the manifesto is coming together.”
He said the only people asking for such detail are in the media – not voters. However I put to him the issue of whether voters deserve to know what Reform UK stand for.
“Voters know what I stand for in this one. I’ve been absolutely clear on that. The biggest reason to vote for me in this election is the budget that’s coming up.
“I have been categorically clear for what I will and won’t vote for. I’m seeking a mandate from them on that. I think I’m the only candidate in this election that’s been honest with the electorate,” he said.
“I won’t vote for a budget that still contains a nation of sanctuary policy, trees in Africa, the waste on overseas offices, and I want a commitment to an upgrade to the ysbyty in Ystrad Mynach,” he said.
“I’ve been clear with people what I am fighting this election on – reigning in the spending, prioritising services here in this area. You’ve got other candidates that are promising to keep the libraries open like I have, you’ve got them promising other things without telling us where the money’s coming from.
“I think taking time to get the detail right, to get the plan for government right, is acceptable from the voters.”
He wants to be a candidate in May but his assessment day with his party has been put back until after the by-election.
“In this campaign it’s all going to be turnout and making the case. I think we’ve made a strong case. I think people are going to be surprised where voters are coming to from,” he said.
“We’ve built a good machine here, I think we’ve got a good team, but ‘with confidence’? My old rugby mind comes through that you play until the final whistle. That’s how it is on a rugby field and that’s what I’m doing here. No-one gets to celebrate. No-one gets to be complacent. It’s all hands on deck and we keep going,” he said.
The full list of candidate and details about the by-election in Caerphilly can be found here.
