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Welsh Labour: fourth leader in 26 months

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18:20UTC

Ken Skates took over as interim Welsh Labour leader on Saturday 9 May, the day after Eluned Morgan resigned having lost her Ceredigion Penfro seat. Morgan is the first sitting head of a UK devolved government to lose her own constituency.

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Key takeaway

Cardiff and Westminster fight parallel Labour selections through summer; the same NEC handles both.

Ken Skates took over as interim Welsh Labour leader on Saturday 9 May 2026, the day after Eluned Morgan resigned the leadership having lost her Ceredigion Penfro seat at the 7 May 2026 Senedd election . Skates is the party's fourth leader in just over two years, following Mark Drakeford, Vaughan Gething, and Morgan herself. No formal candidates have declared.

Morgan, a sitting head of a UK devolved government, lost her own constituency, an outcome with no devolution-era precedent. The mechanism is the same closed-list PR system that delivered Plaid's plurality next door (event 4): under closed-list proportional rules in May 2026, a party falling below threshold in a region forfeits seats regardless of how senior the candidate on the list is. Welsh Labour fell from 30 of 60 Senedd seats in 2021 to 9 of 96 in 2026, the party's worst result since 1906. The system Morgan herself signed off on did exactly what it was designed to do.

The turnover compounds. Drakeford left voluntarily in March 2024. Gething went after the Dauson Environmental donor scandal in summer 2024. Morgan inherited in August 2024 and lost the seat nine months later. Skates is therefore the fourth caretaker-or-elected leader in a 26-month span. No obvious successor currently holds a Senedd seat large enough to anchor a Cardiff Bay candidacy.

The Westminster timing compounds the Cardiff problem. A Welsh Labour leadership contest runs through summer regardless of who wins it, and the UK party is simultaneously fighting the Streeting-and-Burnham crisis at Westminster. Two parallel internal contests will compete for the same pool of party officers, donors, and trade-union backers. The 81-nomination question (event 3, and the Cardiff Bay nominations will move through the same NEC offices on the same calendar.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Welsh Labour has had four different leaders in just over two years. Before the 7 May election, Eluned Morgan was the First Minister and the Welsh Labour leader. On election night, she lost her own seat, meaning she was no longer even an MS. She resigned the leadership the next morning. Ken Skates, another Labour MS, stepped in as interim leader the following day. But no one has yet formally put their name forward to replace Morgan in a proper leadership election. The reason this matters: Welsh Labour has to fight an opposition campaign in the Welsh Parliament with nine seats, rebuilding its identity from scratch, at the same time as the UK Labour party is fighting its own leadership crisis in London. The two contests will use the same pool of party officials and trade union backers.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

Morgan's seat loss in Ceredigion Penfro was the direct mechanical output of closed-list PR. Under the D'Hondt method, each of the 16 six-member Welsh constituencies allocates seats by successive division of party vote totals; a party that falls below the implied threshold in a region receives zero seats from that region regardless of how prominent the list candidate is.

Morgan was first on Labour's Ceredigion Penfro list, which in the old system would have meant she kept her seat regardless of the vote share. Under the new system, zero threshold means zero seats, and the First Minister's name at the top of the list gave no protection.

The leadership churn has a compounding cause beyond the seat loss. Vaughan Gething resigned in summer 2024 after the Dauson Environmental donor scandal, in which his 2024 leadership campaign received £200,000 from a company whose director had previous convictions for environmental offences.

The resignation came five months after his election as First Minister, leaving Morgan to inherit a leadership without a mandate and a party without stability. The 2026 collapse is therefore the fourth in a sequence: Drakeford's planned exit, Gething's forced exit, Morgan's electoral exit, and now Skates' inherited caretaker.

What could happen next?

Risk
A Welsh Labour leadership election running in parallel with a Westminster Labour contest will compete for the same NEC officers, trade union general secretaries, and party donor attention, stretching the Labour organisation's capacity.
Consequence
With nine seats and no declared candidates, Welsh Labour cannot function as a credible official opposition in the Senedd; scrutiny of the ap Iorwerth government defaults to Plaid's own backbenchers and the Reform group.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: Scottish Labour's collapse between 2011 and 2016 (from 37 MSPs to 24 to 23) happened under the same type of regional list system, and the party cycled through four leaders in six years (Iain Gray, Johann Lamont, Jim Murphy, Kezia Dugdale) without arresting the decline.

Each new leader inherited a smaller caucus, fewer resources, and a party whose urban base was being absorbed by the SNP. Welsh Labour in 2026 follows an identical trajectory: a proportional system, a nationalist alternative consolidating the left-of-centre vote, and leadership churn that prevents long-term rebuilding.

Counter-parallel: The Welsh Liberal Democrats held a single MS from 2016 to 2021 and rebuilt to three seats without a leadership crisis, because a single-MS party has a clear floor and nowhere lower to go. Welsh Labour has nine seats, which is small enough to function as a rump but large enough to sustain internal factional disputes. A party with one seat cannot hold a leadership election; a party with nine can.

Sources:Welsh Government

Mentions:Eluned Morgan →Welsh Labour →Scottish Labour →Senedd →Mark Drakeford →Vaughan Gething →Westminster →Parliament →Ceredigion Penfro →Cardiff Bay →Liberal Democrats →Labour National Executive Committee →Scottish National Party (SNP) →Wes Streeting →Andy Burnham →Ken Skates →

First Reported In

Update #8 · Mutiny in week one

Welsh Government· 14 May 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

Welsh Labour collapses to nine seats

Morgan's seat loss on 7 May triggered her resignation and the succession of Skates as interim leader on 8-9 May.

Occurred 6 May 2026

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This Event

Welsh Labour: fourth leader in 26 months

Welsh Labour's fourth leadership turnover in just over two years runs in parallel with the Westminster crisis; Morgan's seat loss is the institutional fact that triggered both the resignation and a fourth selection that no formal candidate has yet declared for.

Different Perspectives

Welsh Government (Plaid Cymru under Rhun ap Iorwerth)

Plaid's Cardiff minority government relies on Green confidence-and-supply with no written agreement, the same arrangement that collapsed in Scotland in 2023. Green Westminster polling fell from 17% to 15% in two weeks as Greens took governing responsibility; whether that deflation reaches Cardiff is the near-term test for ap Iorwerth's majority.

Reform-run English county councils (Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk)

Essex named a City-trained efficiency lead over a budget where statute has already committed roughly 98% of spend; Suffolk simultaneously issued a pre-action letter against the reorganisation that will dissolve it. Reform-controlled authorities are spending public money on litigation their own sector lawyers expect to fail while their DOGE units face statutory constraints they cannot override.

Scottish Government (SNP under John Swinney)

Swinney rested the 72-55 Holyrood mandate on the combined SNP-Green bloc rather than his own party's 58 seats, seven short of the trigger he named; he has publicly conceded he has no plan if Westminster holds its veto. The constitutional argument is made; the enforcement route does not exist.

UK Government (MHCLG and Downing Street)

MHCLG has until 12 June to respond to Suffolk's pre-action letter and faces three further counties at the same stage; Downing Street rejected Holyrood's Section 30 demand as a spokesperson lobby line rather than a written statement, declining to open formal inter-governmental correspondence. Both decisions compress Reform's two main legal challenges into the same two-week window.

UK Government (Labour)

Westminster framed the youth justice transfer as a culmination of prior work rather than a precedent, refused a Section 30 order before the request arrived, and omitted both the Representation of the People Bill and any Wales Bill from the 13 May King's Speech. Starmer is described as open to a devolved-leaders summit in June.

Reform UK

Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk filed pre-action protocol letters framing their LGR challenge as mandate-consistent, while 22 Reform councillors departed in 14 days at an annualised rate nearly three times the 10 percent projection. Richard Tice defended the Harborne 5 million pound gift as unconditional, with no acknowledgement of Farage's two contradictory accounts on record.