“It was Trumpian,” said Mark Mansfield, editor and CEO of Nation.Cymru, a small English-language Welsh news service. “It has perhaps given us a flavour of how a Reform UK government would behave towards the media.”

Mansfield is referring to what he described as an attempt by a figure at Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party to “bully” his publication, but he believes a wider lesson might be learned.

On 12 November, Nation.Cymru published an article when Reform’s only Welsh parliament member, Laura Anne Jones, was banned from the Senedd chamber for 14 days after using a racial slur to describe Chinese people .

The news website named Ed Sumner, now head of communications at Reform, as being one of the recipients of the offensive WhatsApp messages while working for her in August 2023.

Sumner

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