The Conservatives have suffered a humiliating wipeout in Wales with both Labour and Plaid Cymru claiming historic sets of results.
Labour won 27 of the 32 Welsh seats while Plaid ended with four MPs and the Liberal Democrats one but the Tories, who won 14 at the 2019 election, were left with none.
Among those who lost out was David TC Davies, who was Wales secretary in Rishi Sunak’s government. Three other former Wales secretaries, Alun Cairns, Simon Hart and Stephen Crabb, were also defeated.
Craig Williams, Sunak’s closest parliamentary aide, who was embroiled in a betting scandal, lost in Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr, considered the Tories’ safest seat in Wales. Williams said he wanted to “put on record my apology to my team and family”.
The result has echoes of 1997 when Tony Blair came to power and the Welsh Tories were left with no representation at Westminster.
The inquests and recriminations began immediately. The leader of the Tories in the Senedd, Andrew RT Davies, expressed anger at the timing of the election, posting on X: “Let’s be frank: we’ve let a lot of people down.”
Tomos Dafydd Davies, the chair of the party in Wales, suggested the party needed to develop a “robust brand” of its own in Wales before the 2026 Senedd elections.
The Welsh first minister, Vaughan Gething, said: “It’s a really good night for Labour. If you think about where we were in 2019, how far back we were, to win an historic return to power, this is fantastic night.”
Gething said there was a big job to do. “The cost of living crisis has been the number one issue but there is a wider despondency about whether politics can still work and apathy has been a challenge in this election. People have voted for change, it’s now our job to deliver that.”
But the election has not been all good news for Welsh Labour. Its vote share was down in a number of places, perhaps a sign that the controversies swirling around Gething were cutting through.
Laura McAllister, a professor of public policy at Cardiff University, said a fundamental issue now facing Welsh Labour was that its tactic of blaming the UK government for its woes would no longer work – and money is not expected to flow into Wales from the Treasury.
She said: “It’s no longer the case that the Welsh Labour government can blame a cruel Conservative government in Westminster for refusing to give Wales a fair funding settlement, because it will be its own party in charge. I think that will cause quite a lot of tension.”
Jo Stevens, who could become the Wales secretary, said money would reach Wales: “Obviously there’s going to be a cash injection into the NHS to bring waiting lists down. We’ve set out how we’re going to pay for that, and a cash injection into education so that we can recruit more teachers in the specialist subjects that we know that we need in Wales.”
It has been a good election for Plaid Cymru. Its leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth, said: “Despite the tough context of an unprecedented Labour wave, this is the party’s best ever result in a general election – representing the greatest proportion of seats won.”
Analysts will be poring over the performance of Reform UK, which finished second in a string of constituencies and could benefit in 2026 in Wales from the enlargement of the Senedd from 60 seats to 96 and the introduction of a system of proportional representation. Nigel Farage launched his party’s manifesto in Merthyr Tydfil, south Wales, in a sign he believes the country could be fertile ground.
Sam Blaxland, the author of a book studying the Tories in Wales, said: “The Labour vote isn’t necessarily skyrocketing. Reform are eating into the Conservative vote, and we shouldn’t be surprised that they’re doing this in Wales; this is a part of the UK that had a good number of Ukip members of the Senedd and voted for Brexit. There is a populist, rightwing vote up for grabs in some areas and that’s where some Conservative voters have gone.”
