By Ruth Mosalski

Copyright walesonline

Few people hoping to be elected to the Senedd in 2026 will say “I don’t want to be in the government”, let alone someone whose party is, if polls are to be believed, on course to be the biggest party after May 2026, but Lindsay Whittle is that person. “I don’t want to be a minister in Rhun ap Iorwerth’s government,” the Plaid Cymru politician tells me. “We’ve got fantastic people who will do that, but they need the…I’m not sure I’m the quiet old head, but the loud old head at the back.” I suppose that’s the difference of a candidate in the Caerphilly by-election who is past retirement age, with decades of experience in elections behind him, he’s not doing it for his CV. This is a man who has stood in council elections 18 times, for Westminster 10 times, and for every Senedd election in the last 26 years. While his time as a councillor has been consistently successful, higher office has eluded him, except one spell as a regional Assembly Member, although that could be about to change. As we meet in the Tylers Arms in Nelson, with our respective orange juice and Coke Zero, I ask him to start at the beginning, and rapidly realise why more than one person has described him to me as “Mr Caerphilly”. Born in the miner’s hospital he spent the first five days of his life in a shared council house and has spent his entire life living in the town. Not from a political family, it was listening to Gwynfor Evans campaign about Tryweryn which got him interested in politics, but it was the 1968 Caerphilly by-election which really captured his attention. Seen as a safe Labour seat, Plaid were a distant third in 1966, but when Ness Edwards died two years later, Labour scraped through the by-election with a majority of just 1,874, with Phil Williams’ vote share jumping 29% in two years. A figure which is impossible to fathom now, is that 4,000 people were outside the Penyrheol community centre waiting for the result of that election – one of whom was Lindsay Whittle. Through the campaign he’d been one of those mitching off school , listening to the patriotic songs being sung, the flagons of beer being drunk, watching a 700-strong motorcade parading round the town covered in flags. “There seemed to be a wonderful, quiet revolution,” he recalls. A keen activist in the 1970s, he even missed an O-level because he was out canvassing, he says. Having left school with the qualifications he soon realised he needed, he went on to get a job making crash helmets in a local factory before returning to study.. His first taste of elected politics was joining Rhymney Valley District Council in 1976. A year later he became the youngest councillor in Great Britain when he joined Mid Glamorgan council aged 24. “Those people who voted for me in 1976 have long gone, so now it is the sons and daughters, the grandson and granddaughters,” he says. But they still come out for him. At the last council election he got 1,975 votes, the highest, he says, of any councillor in Wales. Still a councillor, he also has four voluntary jobs, working in two local schools, a community coffee shop and a foodbank. “I work better when I’m not paid. I can’t retire. All my friends are away all the time, spending their inheritance, but I can’t,” he says. “It’s just got into the blood. I can’t get out now. I got on the bike and I can’t fall off yet. I love it. It’s what I do. I’m 72 now, and retirement is not for me,” he says. “I’m passionate about people, I am a people person,” he says. “I speak the ordinary language of the ordinary person in the street, and they love it.” Fast forward more than 50 years in the party, for anyone who looks at the list of names in elections, his is always there, but this is his moment as Plaid Cymru’s big hope in the Caerphilly by-election on October 23. He laughs when I diplomatically suggest that this election is different because on many of those previous occasions, he never had a hope. Not that he always believed that, telling me a story about being clapped out of his local pub in 1983 to go to the count where he was sure he would be named the next MP, only to come last. But this time, it’s different. If he wins the by-election, it may only guarantee him a seven month spell in the institution (although he is looking likely to be elected regardless as he has second place on Plaid Cymru’s list for May) but it means a awful lot more. It means Plaid can go into the campaign proper with evidence the polls are right and that people who haven’t chosen them before are now doing so, giving Labour a bloody nose in the seat it has always held. Plus, it will mean Labour will likely struggle with its budget , and what better thing to put in big, bold letters on an election leaflet than the fact after 26 years, Labour can’t deliver the most important of role a government has – the budget that pays councils, the NHS and more. So maybe it’s no surprise the big guns were out to canvass with him on the day we meet. On this sunny afternoon in Nelson he was joined by not only the party’s current leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth, but former leader Dafydd Wigley, now Lord Wigley too, as well as regional MS Delyth Jewell and an assortment of campaigners. To watch that group, stood at corresponding doors, leaflets in hand, wasn’t just a great image, but a statement of intent from Plaid Cymru . He knows campaigning has changed, long gone are those motorcades, replaced with Facebook videos. He has spent time counting the comments, and checking where people who are critical of him are from. “They’re from Manchester and Birmingham and places I’ve never heard of. Fine, you’re entitled to your opinion but they’re from Reform ‘bots’,” he says, checking with me the terminology is right. “I’m from a different generation,” he smiles. While both Reform UK and Labour declined to allow me to see them door knock, Plaid didn’t and on this day, even if there had been a plan to take me to streets sympathetic to their cause, that was thrown out of the window as this breakaway group went with Lord Wigley back to the site of the office he ran for the 1968 election. Yet still, the reaction from the interactions I heard of voters was positive, and feeds into the intel coming from those on the ground that this is a fight between Reform UK and Plaid. Plaid is telling voters, they’re the ones with “positive ideas” and how “this young man”, one Rhun ap Iorwerth, is “our future” and that message seems to be going through. As they spoke to voters, it is clear it is the threat from Reform they were focussing on, telling one undecided voter that voting for Labour, splitting the left, risks letting Reform UK in. “Labour are falling quite far behind,” one voter was told. “The danger with people voting for them is it allows Farage in” – although the Clacton MP isn’t the candidate now, or will be eligible to be in May. As Lindsay Whittle asked one voter to use a scale of one to ten to tell him who they were planning on voting for, “10 out of 10” was the resounding answer, and you get the sense it’s not the first time he’s been told that. Delyth Jewell, leans over his shoulder to say “I’ve known him for years, he’s Mr Caerphilly . He’ll work so hard”. He has no qualms in telling voters, “most people have heard of me”, he says, telling one prospective voter “ordinary people….that’s what we want”. A passing dog walker goes out of his way to tell them they were “fantastic” and I’d have loved to know if the “Labour lady who was around today” was the First Minister, who I was told had been there that day too. But Mr Whittle’s experience means he isn’t naive about the institution he wants to re-enter or backs all the policies his party backs. He speaks about the “silly” rules the Senedd instils on housing is why houses are empty for too long. He didn’t believe the 20mph speed limit should be default and still doesn’t. Libraries and leisure centres are more local issues coming up, and the state of the NHS in Wales for which, he criticises the current administration for a lack of “joined up thinking”. He says Senedd expansion isn’t something coming up – despite claims to the contrary on social media. “When it comes to council houses in this area, there’s over 250 empty at the moment and that’s wrong. I’ve worked as a housing manager, eventually 26 years in Cardiff . My target was four days. Tenant out, tenant in four days. They’re empty now for literally eight, nine months. That’s wrong. We’re paying for people to go into hotels and bed and breakfast. “We’re paying for the shutters for security. We’re losing rent. This is why the country’s in a mess. People are not doing their job and it’s down to silly rules from the Senedd. The Senedd is responsible and the councils, who controls them? Labour.” He says he has 60 cases as part of his councillor workload right now with people wanting help with housing and there is a narrative that immigration is to blame something he argues just isn’t relevant in Caerphilly. “They see immigrants being housed in five star hotels and getting cars…we know it’s not true but they just repeat the lie and they lie, and [people] think ‘that’s why my daughter’s sharing a room and the baby is in a box bedroom is because the immigrants are having all the housing’. They’re not. The only immigrants who have housing in Caerphilly, by and large are the Ukrainians. “And that’s not in the hundreds, in fact it’s under triple figures.” But that narrative is, he admits, getting traction. In all his years, there has never been a new party with quite the force of Reform UK. The rough theory is that the further out of Cardiff you go, and further up the Valleys you go, the stronger Reform UK’s support is. “We’ve had social media in the past, but never like it is,” he says. A narrative from both Reform UK and the Conservatives about the Nation of Sanctuary is getting through and coming up on the doorsteps he says. But, when he explains that money is mainly helping Ukrainian families integrate, their tone changes.” He lists the names of his neighbours growing up, Polish refugees from the war, the Italians who came to Wales and set up the famous Bracchi cafes, northerners, cockneys and Irish people, he says: “We’ve been a Nation of Sanctuary since World War Two,” he says. This fear of immigration he can’t explain. “You’d have to ask those people who are fearful.” “I think that the fear is being heightened by single incidents. You could say of paedophile gangs ‘well, they’re all foreigners’ They’re not. Nobody is in favour of paedophile gangs, I don’t care what country they’re from. I want them locked up and the key thrown away and I speak as a father of a daughter and a grandfather. “They’re horrible people, but they’re not necessarily all from away,” he says. “I understand fear, it’s a terrible thing. It gets me cross when I see people from the left saying ‘they’re all racist’ They’re not. Some are, of course, there’s a lot about, but not everybody is a racism because they support Reform, what we’ve got to do is convince those people who are not racist the error of their ways,” he says. As we part ways, he goes off to a meeting at Caerphilly rugby club, joined by Rhun ap Iorwerth. See the full list of candidate and details of the by-election.