Dan Thomas has suddenly burst onto the political scene in Wales, after being chosen by Nigel Farage as Reform UK’s Welsh leader at the Senedd election.
Opinion polls have consistently indicated Reform is on track to win large numbers of seats on 7 May, and this is the party’s candidate to be Wales’s next first minister in just three months’ time.
We will be seeing a lot of Thomas between now and 7 May – he will be the face of the party in television debates, interviews and so on.
In his first appearance as leader at a Reform rally in Newport with Farage, Thomas said he was originally from Blackwood – “born and raised in the Welsh valleys, where my family lived for generations”.
Both his grandfather and great grandfather were miners, he said, and he had “fond memories” of growing up in Wales – but left when he became an adult because “good opportunities” there were “few and far between”.
He worked in financial services in London and became a councillor, and later Conservative leader, at Barnet council in the north of the capital.