How a leisure centre and a lads’ holiday led me to Nigel Farage

YOUR lads’ holiday to Magaluf being cut short because you worked too much overtime is an unusual reason to enter politics.

- JONATHAN MYERS

In fact of all the people I’ve ever asked how they've ended up in politics, it’s the first time that someone has ever told me it was because of an EU working directive.

‘The story, as Reform UK’s candidate in the Caerphilly by election Llyr Powell tells it, is that after leaving school at 16 he was working in Pontardawe leisure centre doing a range of jobs - from setting up the gyms for classes to parties and cleaning.

Around the time he turned 18 he wanted to go on his first holiday with friends to Magaluf and asked to work extra hours. By doing so, he not only caused issues with the local union and lost the shifts he needed but HMRC contacted him and said he would get the money back for that holiday the following April - long after the summer sun had been and gone.

“That made me a bit curious and I started looking into different politics and then I saw a chap on YouTube who I thought was hilarious!” said Mr Powell, who polls suggest is now one of the front runners to win the by-election on October 23, a week today.

“Sometimes he liked to throw a few comments around at the EU and questioned different things. He was talking about tax levels and it really intrigued me. So I went to see him live in the Liberty Stadium in Swansea and that man was Nigel Farage.”

At that point Mr Farage, now an MP, was campaigning for the 2014 European elections.

Fast forward 11 years and the pair’s journey remains intertwined. Now Mr Powell hopes to become the next Senedd member for Caerphilly and, in turn, the first elected Senedd politician for Mr Farage’s Reform UK.

He admits he wasn’t politically minded before that Swansea event and he is the first in his family to go into politics since his great-grandfather knocked on doors for Labour.