Given the huge challenges this system has created for Labour, one might
hope its UK leader would provide, well, leadership. Yet at no point in the
entire byelection campaign did Keir Starmer visit the constituency. Labour
has enjoyed more than 100 years of electoral success in Wales, and Welsh
Labour has been hailed as the democratic world’s “most successful election-
winning machine” At a time when Starmer risks being the first Labour leader
to lose Wales, the prime minister either felt he would be an electoral liability
or he wasn’t bothered to show up. Either way, this helped to seal the party’s
fate.