Who really won the by-election in Caerphilly? I know officially it was Plaid Cymru, and I wouldn’t want to diminish that funny little party’s glee. Congrats, etc. But the true victor was a far newer party. An angry party. A party of the fretful and anxious. A party so fresh it doesn’t even have a name yet. I say we call it Not Reform.

Farage is now the behemoth of British politics, so much so that pretty much all elections now boil down to this question: Reform UK or Not Reform UK?

I think it is pretty clear that it was this nameless entity that propelled Plaid Cymru’s Lindsay Whittle to victory last night. That this seismic upset was fuelled less by a burning enthusiasm for the petit-bourgeois nationalism of those Welsh breakaways than by a growing middle-class angst over Nigel Farage.

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