Former Tory on Nigel Farage in Wales - 'It was just miraculous'

A revolution is taking place before our eyes, according to a former Conservative cabinet minister now working for a breakthrough for Reform UK. David Jones served as Brexit minister and Welsh Secretary but found himself appalled at the actions of his own Government in the dying days of Tory rule.

Reform will face one of its greatest electoral tests yet in May when it will seek to turn today’s support in the polls into success in the Welsh Parliament elections. Labour has emerged as the biggest party in every Westminster and Senedd election for more than a century. Ending this winning streak would turbocharge Reform’s hopes of taking power in the UK election which must be held before the end of the decade.

Can Mr Farage win over the Welsh electorate and stop voters disenchanted with Labour and the Conservatives going over to Welsh nationalists Plaid Cymru? Mr Jones is confident he can.

“I went with Nigel Farage to the Royal Welsh Show and I was astounded at the reception he had,” he says. “It was just miraculous, really.”

Welsh voters, he argues, know “Plaid Cymru is essentially a Left-wing socialist party wearing green clothes” and he predicts a “complete collapse of the Conservative vote”.

He understands how once diehard Conservatives are losing faith in Kemi Badenoch’s party because he has been on this journey himself.

Mr Jones briefly served in the Senedd before winning the North Wales seat of Clwyd West in 2005. He was a Welsh Secretary for David Cameron and a Brexit minister for Theresa May, but three key disappointments with the Conservatives pushed him out of the party.

He regards Rishi Sunak’s Windsor Framework deal with the EU – which is designed to avoid the need for a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic – as “absolutely devastating”.

“We’ve now arrived at a situation where Northern Ireland is semi-detached from the rest of the UK,” he says. “It’s had the most awful effect upon the integrity of the UK.”

Mr Jones also believed the Bill designed to send illegal immigrants to Rwanda was “wouldn’t work” – and warned Mr Sunak and then-Home Secretary Sir James Cleverly.

“I suspect part of the reason the Government went to the country early was because they knew it was defective and they didn’t want to see cases [going to] the High Court and the Supreme Court,” he says.

And he was deeply disappointed the Conservatives did not go much further in stripping European laws out of the statute book.

He remembers thinking: “If these people are Conservatives then quite clearly I don’t belong in this party.”

The veteran solicitor had time to reflect after leaving Parliament in July last year. In October he wrote to the party chairman to say he would not renew his membership that January.

“I didn’t get a reply from him,” he says. “I thought, clearly, they are not going to miss me very much, so I left effectively in January.”

He had worked alongside Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice on the pro-Brexit group Leave Means Leave. And he is struck by how many former Conservatives have since told him he has “done exactly the right thing”.

“There is a strong feeling the country is in decline and the Conservative and Labour parties are pretty well indistinguishable from each other,” he says. “People want change.”

David Cameron’s winning 2010 manifesto contained a pledge to get net migration down to “tens of thousands” a year. But the figure spiralled to 906,000 for the 12 months to June 2023 and has remained in the hundreds of thousands.

Mr Jones says he finds the failure to get a grip on immigration “incomprehensible”, adding: “It was basically a failure of policy and failure of implementation by the Conservative Government and that’s another reason I don’t consider myself to be a Conservative anymore – at least, not with a capital C.”

He is a firm supporter of taking the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights, describing it as the “principle reason why we can’t get rid of many of these illegal immigrants”.

“To be honest,” he says, “I never thought it was an essential part of our legal system anyway. You could say that the UK invented human rights – the English legal system has always protected and recognised human rights.”

He adds: “If people are genuine asylum seekers they will be protected by the common law. There is no question about it.”

At the age of 73, he is six years younger than Donald Trump. Does he fancy returning to frontline politics?

“No,” he says. “Absolutely not... I’m helping Reform out with policy in the run-up to the next Welsh election next year.

“I’m very happy to do that and I’m very happy to give them advice but I don’t want to do any more than that.”

As Welsh Secretary he regularly locked horns with the Welsh Labour Government in Cardiff. He is convinced that in key areas such as health and education Labour has let down Welsh voters.

“The Welsh health service is getting worse and worse,” this husband of a former nurse says. “It’s not because of any incompetence or lack of application by doctors and nurses.

“It’s purely and simply because it’s badly organised by the Welsh Government. It’s quite wrong that people in Wales who pay their taxes at exactly the same rate as anybody else should have such a substandard set of public services and that’s got to change.”

He argues the “most important thing for Reform to do is to get its message out [and] make sure people understand there is hope for real change”.

Boris Johnson painted many of Labour’s traditional England heartlands blue in the 2019 election but could not capture the South Wales Valleys. Will Mr Farage be embraced by the Welsh electorate?

“Nigel Farage is somebody who appeals to everybody,” Mr Jones insists. “Not just English people.”

Former Labour voters, he strongly suspects, are “going to be so appalled” by Sir Keir Starmer’s party “both at a UK and a Welsh level they will either vote Reform or else stay at home in disgust”.

Describing the scale of change he sees coming for Britain, he says: “I think what we are seeing at the moment, not just in Wales but across the whole of the UK, is a revolution.”

Unlike Scotland and Northern Ireland, Wales voted to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum. Mr Jones regrets the Tories’ response to the result.

“Brexit was an opportunity that should have been seized more enthusiastically,” he says. “There was a strong tendency within the Conservative party to oppose it, and of course you saw that in the sequence of meaningful votes and the rebellions against Boris.”

In the torturous negotiations, he claims, the UK was “never anywhere near sufficiently robust with the European Union” as Tory PMs sought to “accommodate the europhile element within the Conservative party which is still there”.

As with many Brexiteers, he sees the mission of winning back sovereignty as a work in progress.

“People voted for Brexit because they wanted to see the United Kingdom in charge of its own affairs,” he says. “The first thing we need to do is take steps to extricate ourselves from the European Convention of Human Rights because that is a major impediment to our own sovereignty, so that will have to go. We will never be a sovereign country so long as we are part of that convention.”

Despite the changes facing Britain, he remains an optimist about this “very, very wonderful country”.

“We’ve got temporary problems at the moment,” he says. “We’ve got an absolutely awful Government – the worst I can remember in my lifetime.

“If we get rid of them, that will be a huge start and it will cause a huge amount of optimism in the country at a stroke.”

He adds: “I think there will be a readiness for people to do their very best to make sure this country does revive and become successful again.

“It is a pretty bad state of affairs we’ve got at the moment, there’s no doubt, but things can always get better and I’m sure they will with a better government and a different spirit within the people.”