Tories ‘parachuting candidates from different parts of Wales’

Martin Shipton

The Welsh Conservatives have struggled to field a full list of candidates for next month’s Senedd election – and in some cases has had to import them from other parts of Wales.

Under the new arrangements, six Senedd Members will be elected from each of the 16 new “super-constituencies” into which Wales has been divided.

People will vote for a political party rather than for individual candidates, and the seats will be allocated in each of the constituencies on a proportional basis. .

Until the dissolution of the Senedd earlier this week, Sam Rowlands was a regional MS representing North Wales. He and his wife Natasha live in Abergele

On May 7 Mrs Rowlands will be the number 5 candidate on the Welsh Conservative list in Sir Gaerfyrddin, a constituency that covers the whole of Carmarthenshire.

Some of the Tory candidates for the Senedd are rather oddly placed.

Abigail Mainon is a Conservative Party worker understood to live in Bodelwyddan, Denbighshire. Yet she will be the number one candidate in Afan Ogwr Rhondda.

Rachael Astle is also standing in Afan Ogwr Rhondda, where she is placed fifth on the list. She is a former member of staff to Dr James Davies when he was an MP. She lives in Prestatyn, North Wales.

A political source told us: “Some of the Tory candidates for the Senedd are rather oddly placed. It seems the Tories can’t even find paper candidates in the South without resorting to using strangers from the North.”

In previous Senedd elections, anyone living in the UK could stand for election. Most famously, the former Tory MP Neil Hamilton, who lost his seat at Tatton, Cheshire in 1997 following a “cash for questions” scandal, was elected in 2016 to represent Mid and West Wales, despite living in a mansion in Weltshire.

But the law has since been changed and Senedd candidates must now be registered to vote at an address anywhere in Wales.

A Conservative source told Nation.Cymru: “Our aim was to field 96 candidates – one for each seat available – and that is what we will do.”

Struggle

Another Tory source said: “It’s true that finding enough candidates has been a struggle, and in some areas it wasn’t possible to get enough local people to cover the six seats.

“In a small number of cases it was decided to choose candidates from different parts of Wales to ensure we had enough people to have a full list. It would have looked very bad if we had fallen short.”

The difficulty in filling the places comes at a time when the Conservatives may turn in their worst electoral performance in Wales since universal suffrage was introduced nearly 100 years ago. Although at the general election in 2024 they lost all 14 of the seats they had won at the previous election in 2019, they did secure 18.2% of the vote.

Current polling suggests the Tories could secure as little as 9% of the vote.

A Conservative source told Nation.Cymru: “We’re not doing well on the doorstep, but it’s very difficult to predict how that will translate into seats. In any constituency, the expectation is that you need to win 11% or 12% of the vote in order to elect an MS.

“In many constituencies the likelihood is that we will be competing for the sixth seat to be allocated. Who wins could come down to a very small number of votes. Frankly, we have no idea how many seats we will end up with.”