Meeting 'Mr Caerphilly' - the eternal election candidate hoping to give Labour a bloody nose

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.

- Political editor Ruth Mosalski reports

“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 with 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 miners’ 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.