Llyr Gruffydd spoke to WalesOnline about the impact politics had taken on his family life and his success on Titkok
14:52, 19 Apr 2026Updated 14:52, 19 Apr 2026
(Image: John Myers)
If you spend time on Tiktok, you’ll probably encounter a video of a 55-year-old man in a suit and tie talking animatedly about Welsh politics moving in jump cuts from the mid distance ever closer, until he’s eyeballing you through his rounded steel-rimmed glasses through the screen of your phone.
A few years ago, you’d probably have got decent odds on a bet that a balding Senedd Member would become the star of Welsh politics Tiktok, putting arguments about the devolution of policing in front of the teenagers and young adults who are the biggest users of the video-sharing app. It’s not something the man himself would ever have expected himself to be doing.
Yet Llyr Gruffudd has proven to have a gift for conveying both charisma and political passion in slick, snappy videos. A former youth worker with a sideline in acting and presenting on S4C, he’s used his broadcasting experience to create posts which have racked up hundreds of thousands of views and, 12 months ago, he crossed the benchmark of a million unique users.
There’s a video where he used Oasis song titles to explain “where Labour has gone wrong”. He turned football commentator to tease Labour with his “Senedd transfer news” and he used the wait for the Bay’s big wheel as a parallel for “waiting for the HS2 cash”.
His video about Reform UK, and reasons people shouldn’t vote for them, got 760,000 views and counting.
“I rarely go anywhere without people saying, ‘oh, we’ve seen you’,” says the Plaid Cymru frontbencher, who has represented North Wales as a regional MS in the Senedd since 2011 and has served in several shadow ministerial roles, most recently as rural affairs spokesperson.
I tell him I feel too old to use the site, so how does he feel. “Oh I know,” he says. “Had you told me this myself three years ago, I’d have said ‘No, not for me.”
But he says, the changing ways people get their news spurred him on. “We [the party] were conscious that news consumption is changing.
“I was feeling local papers are on the wane, printed media isn’t what it used to be, television and radio too, but if you look at the demographics as well, those under 25, half of those people get their news, not even from online news websites, but actually from social media, and it’s about cutting out the middleman.
“We sometimes put a press release out and the BBC might, for example, carry it and give it a spin and I’m thinking, ‘well, actually, that’s not quite what we’d intended for that to be portrayed as’.
“So you sometimes think, ‘well actually we can do it directly ourselves’.
“It really is reaching the parts and predominantly a younger age group, 16 or 17-year-olds are voting at this Senedd election now, so it’s a really important demographic for us. It doesn’t mean we ignore the other more traditional media outlets as well, but it just gives us something extra.
“You look at some of the phenomena around [New York mayor] Zoran Mamdani, it’s social first, isn’t it? His news agenda is led by social media and everybody sort of picks up from that.
On a visit in 2015, with then leader Leanne Wood(Image: ugc mwl)
“But it’s got to be authentic, it’s a bit humorous, a bit quirky at times, but it really has to be you and not some sort of front that somebody’s constructed for you.
“Now, obviously, there’s a team of people around me who give ideas and suggestions and I lob in some ideas as well and sometimes I think ‘oh god that’s never going to work, you’ll never get me to do that’ and it got to a point about two years ago when we came to go well look we’ve got to give it a go, otherwise you’re not going to know if it works or not.
“Some of the things, I was pretty uncomfortable at the start, in terms of being a bit jokey and that kind of thing but because you’re always worried that it’ll bomb.
“If it bombs, it’s only a couple of people who have seen it anyway, so you’ve got nothing to lose.”
“The negative ones do better than the positive ones, which is a bit sad, but they tend to have legs because they generate responses and that feeds the algorithm and then it flies.”
He doesn’t lose hours on end scrolling he says, but does check in. “I go back now and again and just have a look. I don’t spend time looking at all the comments otherwise I would not have time to do my day job,” he says, but finds himself him checking out the stats.
He has four kids, aged 21, 19, 17 and 13, are they not mortified, I ask?
“No, they’re my best cheerleaders, they like and share them, they’re very good, fair play. They will tell me if people have been commenting negatively or aping my videos,” he says.
“One of the boys messaged me yesterday ‘have you seen another member’s video? He’s clipped the start of yours and he’s doing exactly like you did,’. That’s great, isn’t it?” he says.
He does have some pedigree for it. As an 18-year-old, he was in the second series and the S4C film of Jabas, a show he describes to me as the Welsh version of Grange Hill, playing the son of a preacher who’d moved up from south Wales to live in the Llyn Peninsula.
“A lot of people who are of an age and are Welsh-speaking, would have also seen my backside because that was one of the low points of the series, me flashing my behind through a window,” he laughs.
Catching up on his socials in the Senedd(Image: John Myers)
He also did some football commentary and presenting too, he says, reporting on the Welsh Premier League.
He chuckles: “There’s a lot about me that people don’t know”.
We’re meeting as Plaid are riding high in the polls, as he gets set to leave the Senedd and focus on campaigning in his patch of Clwyd where he tops the list.
Plaid is, he admits, “in my genes, it’s in the blood”. His father, Peter Huws Gruffydd, worked for Gwynfor Evans, the first Plaid Cymru MP. His formative years in Carmarthenshire saw people like Gwynfor, Dafydd Wigley and Dafydd Elis Thomas popping into the house for meetings.
Elected politicians weren’t alien or daunting to him. “It was just a part of what was around me as I was growing up,” he says.
After university, he went back to Carmarthenshire, initially standing for town council. He was 26 at the time of the referendum, but 28 at the time of the first Senedd election, but he didn’t feel ready to stand, despite having been asked. He was working for Dafydd Wigley at the time as his organiser, which was something he describes as a “wonderful experience” being out at meetings, meeting people.
“That’s the best bit about politics. Being sat in committee rooms scrutinising legislation, with all due respect to legislation, isn’t the most exciting at times. I really love being out there in communities, but that’s when I think I realised, having visited all constituencies, seeing all candidates in action, of all parties thinking ‘I could do that, I don’t really need to think that I’m not up to this’.”
He was elected in 2011, then a dad-of-three, and before the days of video calls but splitting his time between his patch of north Wales, and his requirement to be in the Senedd in Cardiff Bay at least four hours south of his home. Outside of the building we sit in, I don’t think the reality of that is often noted, I tell him.
“But not just for the politician, but for the rest of the family. It cost me my marriage, I’d be open about that. We’re divorced now, had I been at home more I think we’d probably, well who knows,” he trails off.
It is a heck of a sacrifice, I tell him.
“You don’t always think of it that way. You stand for election sometimes without expecting to win at the time, knowing that you are going to win, or at least on past form thinking that it’s more likely than not and I suppose I went into it eyes open really in terms of expecting to, because Plaid had always won the top seats on the North Wales regional list, although it all depended on which constituencies the party won, etc and it sort of takes over your life.
“And sometimes then you overcompensate maybe when you’re at home sometimes, which is not saying makes it worse but it’s not great,” he says.
The post-pandemic landscape, working remotely, has made things better, he said, and there has been a conscious decision to try make the Senedd more accessible, but it is not easy.
“It’s a two-way thing, mind, because sometimes I look jealously at members who live within a 40 or 50-mile radius of Cardiff thinking, ‘oh, they can go home every night’ but of course, that also means that they have to go to every public meeting midweek if there’s something happening, there’s no getting away.
“I can legitimately apologise and excuse myself for not being around.
“So it isn’t always the thin edge of the wedge, but it is hugely challenging.
“My advice to anyone who is contemplating standing is to really think about that, but of course to know that it is what you make it as well. Maybe sometimes you inadvertently neglect elements of your life that maybe you should be more careful about, then of course when you realise maybe it’s too late isn’t it,” he says.
Despite the personal sacrifices he has clearly made, he continued to put himself forward for election.
“Without going into too much detail, obviously, but it hit me like a train, really, when I was told that there wasn’t a future in our relationship and had I maybe been wise to that sooner, maybe I would have made different decisions,” he says.
What is it, about that place, that keeps him coming back?
“Well it’s always been part of my life from when I was a very young child so it’s even more intense for me, I think in terms of being politically involved.
“It’s all I know. It’s in the genes, but it is that sense of wanting to right some wrongs that I see around me and I am not the kind of person who will moan and shout from the sidelines that something needs fixing and wait and expect somebody else to fix it for me.
“It’s all about stepping in and saying ‘ok, if we want to do it right we’ve got to do and this is how I want it done’. I’ve been lucky that the people of north Wales have given me the opportunity to do that for the last 15 years.”
On the ground, it’s the best he’s known it, they have the biggest teams going out in in his constituency that they’ve ever seen, but they need to keep their feet on the ground, he says.
“It’s a virtuous circle. You’ve got to make the most of it, haven’t you? We’re starting from the best place we’ve ever started, polling-wise. There’s a long way to go and we just want to make sure that we get this over the line.
“Things can change, we accept that, but we don’t want to look back on the 8th or 9th of May whenever the votes are counted and regret that we didn’t leave any stone unturned,” he says.
He acknowledges that Plaid is seemingly benefitting from Labour’s decline. Does he wish they were converting people on their own terms?
“I think we’re getting more on our own terms than people give us credit for because if somebody is disenchanted with Labour then they have other options, don’t they? But the polls are clearly saying the vast, vast majority of those are coming to Plaid, so there has to be a reason for them choosing Plaid.
“But of course, if you look at the political tradition in Wales, it’s a strong Labour tradition, isn’t it? It’s a generational thing.
“You still have people saying, ‘oh, my dad would turn me as grave if he knew I wasn’t voting Labour’ but despite all of that now, people are saying actually It’s time for change and I think it’s healthy for democracy as well to have that change.
“But people have a choice of which change they want to choose and we’re getting a really positive response to some of the things that we’re putting forward clearly and there is the Reform element as well.
“It isn’t just the demise of Labour. They saw what happened in Caerphilly and they understand that if that sort of anti-Reform vote is fractured as well then there’s a risk to that.
“There’s number of sort of dynamics playing out here, but the main one that we’re promoting, obviously, is what we’re putting on the table in terms of our prospectus and proposition to the people of Wales”.
It’s widely acknowledged that being the noisy opposition is easier than governing, could his party be about to find out how hard governing is?
“I don’t think we need to learn how hard it is, I think we already appreciate how hard it is. For our free daily briefing on the biggest issues facing the nation, sign up to the Wales Matters newsletter here
“It’s just that we think that we can do it better and being given the opportunity, if we are given that chance, to do things differently I think is exciting as well as daunting and intimidating at the same time but it really is exciting because I’ve been doing this since I was knee high, sat in that corner of that room with my father and Gwynfor Evans and some of the grandees of Plaid Cymru in the past.
“I haven’t sort of worked 40 years of my life to get to a point to think ‘I don’t really fancy it’.
“We cherish the opportunity, we absolutely respect the opportunity and we will give everything we have to make the most of that opportunity.
“I’m not sure we’ve got the luxury of four years actually because we’ve seen what’s happened on a UK level, this culture of instant gratification is one that people will want to see things happening immediately and that, I think, is the biggest challenge.”
Does he want a ministerial role?
“Yes, yes. I mean I’ve spent 15 years of my time asking ministers why haven’t they done this, that and the other. I think a lot of people would agree well it’s about time I had a chance to show what they should be doing.
“And then the people of Wales can judge as to whether I’ve managed to do that or not if we get to that point. But we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”
A former interim leader, I ask whether he thinks the party’s preference is for a minority government, rather than a coalition deal.
“I mean we look at what the SNP did in 2007 where they government successfully as a minority government as challenging as that always is and there’s different ways of negotiating paths to delivery within that.
“There are so many variables, it really is difficult to gauge, but there’s probably about a dozen and more scenarios.”
As we discuss various options with the First Minister vote, and forming of a government, I suggest it’s going to be a long summer in Cardiff Bay.
“It is,” he agrees.
“I’m hoping that we get to a point where if there is to be a Plaid Cymru government, that we can get things moving quickly because 27 years is a long time to wait for change and okay, if it takes 27 days to sort that out, fair enough, but after that I think we need to get on it and get delivering for people”.
