Tory MS accused of engineering friend’s selection as Senedd candidate

Martin Shipton

Welsh Conservative activists have accused an MS from their own party of ensuring that a long-serving former council leader did not get selected for a winnable Senedd seat.

Instead they believe that Natasha Asghar engineered matters so that a Senedd Conservative staff member secured the coveted nomination.

A Tory source told Nation.Cymru: “I know you’re interested in selections, so you may be interested in this. There seems to be some foul play in the selection of candidates for [Casnewydd Islwyn – a new Senedd super-constituency covering the two Westminster seats of Newport East and Newport West & Islwyn] .

“Cllr Matthew Evans came last out of three vying for the second spot on the list.

“It is believed Natasha Asghar co-ordinated a campaign to ensure he came last in favour of the Senedd staffer, Toby Jones, who is a close friend of hers.

“She signed up a lot of members just in case she didn’t get incumbency. It was an insurance to ensure she’d win the member ballot; having got incumbency she has used the extra ballots to help her friend.

“It came as a shock to many in Newport, as the youngster, Jake Enea, beat Matthew, a long serving councillor. It can only mean that Asghar’s supporters saw Matt as the threat and ranked him down.

“Many think it is absurd that a long serving, hardworking councillor has been beaten by a staffer who has never helped the association at any time.”

Six Mss

From next year the number of Senedd Members will increase from 60 to 96, and Wales will be split into six “super-constituencies”, each of which will elect six MSs by means of the closed list method of proportional representation, under which people vote for a party rather than individual candidates. Parties decide which order their candidates are elected if they secure sufficient numbers of votes.

The Welsh Conservatives decided that their sitting MSs would be granted “incumbency rights”, meaning that they would be given positions at the top of their relevant closed list.

Another senior Tory source told us: “It is believed that Natasha Asghar signed up between 20 and 30 new party members around March 2024 in order to secure her selection for the new seat. At the time the party hadn’t decided its position on incumbency, so it was a kind of insurance policy. She then had the votes in the bag, so when it came to the selection she encouraged people to vote for Toby, and that’s what happened.

“This is all very reminiscent of how her late father operated after he defected to the Conservatives from Plaid Cymru.”

Defected

Ms Asghar’s father Mohammad Asghar was elected as a Plaid Cymru regional Assembly Member for South Wales East in 2007. Two years later he defected to the Conservatives, claiming that he disapproved of Welsh independence and supported the monarchy. Later he confirmed that the real reason for his defection was that Plaid Cymru told him that he could not employ his daughter Natasha.

Subsequently there were allegations in the run-up to the 2011 Assembly election that Mr Asghar had paid the Conservative Party membership fees of individuals so that they could vote for him to be a high-ranked Tory candidate. He successfully secured such a position and was re-elected as a Conservative Assembly Member in 2011 and 2016.

Mr Asgar died suddenly in 2020, and his daughter Natasha was elected to his former regional Assembly seat in 2021.

Speaking about the selection of Conservative candidates in Casnewydd Islwyn, a third Tory source told Nation.Cymru: “There is no doubt that Natasha Asghar is responsible for what has happened. It’s very unfair on Mathew Evans, who has worked really hard and who led Newport council when there was a Tory-Lib Dem coalition some years ago.

“In 2019 he was only 902 votes behind Labour at the general election.”

‘New generation’

But another Tory source said: “Matthew Evans has had many chances in the past and has never won. It’s time for a new generation of candidates to take over.”

We put it to Ms Asghar that she had been responsible for Mr Evans’ defeat in the candidate selection contest.

She responded: “This is simply not true.”

Asked whether she had encouraged members to vote for Toby Jones, she didn’t reply.

Cllr Evans declined to comment. It is understood he has withdrawn from the closed list, where he would have been placed in an unwinnable fourth position.

In the original version of this story, it was stated that Toby Jones works for Ms Asghar. In fact he works for another Conservative MS. We apologise for the error.