'I'm here until the bitter end'

Things may look bleak when it comes to the polls, but First Minister Eluned Morgan is not backing away from the battle, launching broadsides at Reform UK who 'couldn't run a bath' and calling for a 'bit of discipline' in her own party as she speaks of 'starting something new' to political editor Ruth Mosalski ...

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WHILE many look forward to a new year anticipating change and excitement, Eluned Morgan knows 2026 will be the year she faces the fight of her political career.

At the point in December when we meet, she is head of both Welsh Labour and the Welsh Government and an elected representative for the area of Wales she calls home. By May all of those could well be over.

If the polls are right, and if voters continue to turn away from her party, Labour could be out of power in Wales for the first time in 26 years. It would bring to an end decades of electoral success in Wales and potentially the end of her spell as a Senedd member too.

She has little more than four months to convince voters to back her and her party.

She has admitted that when she took over as First Minister in August 2024 she took over a party and Senedd group which were both divided.

She didn't just have to try to get them back in line but also had to convince that Labour's bitter infighting would end and they'd get back to the job at hand - running a country.

But that infighting hasn't ended - her backbenchers recently wrote a damning letter to Sir Keir Starmer, and her own comments about her parliamentary colleagues have reopened old wounds there too. And her party, at both a Welsh and UK level, has got less and less popular.

A poll in September showed her party, elected in 2021 with 40% of the vote, has slumped to just 14%.

The day after we meet in December another poll of some 2,500 people projected it had fallen further to just 10%.

The data shows that Labour is losing voters to both Plaid Cymru - projected to be the winners in May's election - and Reform UK. There is deep unhappiness at the performance of the UK Government, at her administration and a general shift away from the existing parties in power.