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.