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Dan Thomas, a former Conservative leader of Barnet council, has been announced by Nigel Farage as Reform UK’s leader in Wales, three months before Senedd elections in which the hard-right party could win the most seats in the country.
Farage received a standing ovation before he introduced Thomas at a sold-out rally of approximately 1,000 people at the International Convention Centre Wales, near Newport, on Thursday morning. Journalists were jeered and booed during the media conference.
Thomas led Barnet council between 2019 and 2022, when the north London council was seized by Labour, and defected to Farage’s Reform party last summer. He stood down in December as a councillor for Finchley Church End – long synonymous with Margaret Thatcher – to move back to his south Wales valleys home town, Blackwood.
Farage, asked whether he had chosen an outsider to the Welsh branch of the party in an effort to distance Reform from former Welsh leader, Nathan Gill, who was jailed for accepting bribes to make pro-Russia statements in the European parliament, said: “Why did I pick Dan? He tells a story of someone who had to go away but loves Wales so much he wants his own children to grow up in a similar environment.
“And above all, because he’s battle hardened … Running budgets and facing opposition to development and many other things, and I think Reform UK here in Wales deserves to be led by somebody who’s been there before and will keep a calm head through the good and bad.”
Thomas said: “We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to smash Labour’s failing grip in Wales … I will pour my heart and soul into fighting for every vote. We’re fighting to win because this is the last chance for Wales. We are at a turning point.”
Before announcing Thomas’s appointment, Farage introduced James Evans as the party’s newest Conservative defector. Evans, the Senedd member for Brecon and Radnorshire, was sacked by the Tories last month because of suspicions he was planning to join Reform, and has since sat as an independent.
Evans’s defection takes the number of Reform MSs in the Senedd to two, after the Conservative MS for South Wales East, Laura Anne Jones, left last July.
Farage has made gains in the Welsh parliament before: seven UK Independence party (Ukip) members were elected through the former national assembly’s regional lists vote in 2016.
While support for Reform has surged in the past 12 months as Welsh Labour struggles with a 26-year-long incumbency disadvantage and an unpopular leader in Westminster, polling last month suggested Reform has dropped from 29% to 23% of the vote.
Such a result would still allow the party to increase its two MSs to 23, and would still make Farage’s outfit the first rightwing party with a chance of winning in Wales since the 1850s, but could suggest Reform’s support has peaked.
On Thursday Farage said Thomas would have “full autonomy” on Welsh policy and in dealing with devolved governance matters.
“I wouldn’t even pretend to know what needed to happen within the failing NHS in Wales. When it comes to national policy, if we have a disagreement …[We will come to] a conclusion and work it out,” he said.
Reform UK candidates for Senedd lists would be announced in the first half of March, and the party would be fielding nearly 100 candidates across the 16 new constituencies created by the new voting system, Farage said.
Thomas said a “positive, ambitious” manifesto would be announced soon.
Currently, Reform policies in Wales are thin on the ground. The party has said it would abolish the Welsh government’s 20mph speed limit in urban areas, a promise it reiterated on Thursday. Farage has also pledged to reopen Wales’s coalmines and restart the blast furnaces at Port Talbot’s steelworks despite criticism that the plans are “technically impossible”.
