NIGEL FARAGE is evidently in favour of the veiled insult so far as his apparent estimation of the intellectual capacity of voters is concerned.

Three months before Senedd elections on 7 May, an attempt to find out what, specifically, he knows about, and would do about, the many and various problems and preoccupations of mid and west Wales, and Reform UK fobs us off with two paragraphs totalling 79 words.

Yes, the unspoken message seems to be, that’s yer lot. That’s the extent of your thinking resource. Now you can get back to downing your Farage pints and rehearsing your clipped Farage formulas for a Better Britain and get a good night’s sleep. So simple, so uncluttered.

The 79 words in question in the party’s Our Policies statement are about “farmers and the rural economy”, but are so sketchy and unspecific as to be close to useless for anyone trying to get a grip on Reform’s nuts-and-bolts intentions. There is not even any mention of Wales as such.

“Britain’s farmers”, this homage to brevity goes, “are the lifeblood of our country and backbone of our food security, but they have been pushed to breaking point by Whitehall diktats. Pursuit of net zero at any cost has led to productive farmland being littered with solar panels and wind farms.

“Reform UK will rip up paperwork burdens, restore common sense, and end the punitive taxation of family farms. We will let farmers farm again and ensure that they’re paid fair prices for their produce.”

Yes, some good points there, including on panels and turbines marauding food-production, but give us more detail. Nope. That’s yer lot. We’re not here to tax the electorate’s powers of debate and reasoning.

Reform offers not a word about how how to improve rural Wales’s NHS, including, centrally, the key contributors of Westminster funding and Cardiff priorities.

There is silence on the scandal of rural Wales poverty further burdened by exposure to Britain’s highest energy prices. A promise to “scrap net zero to cut energy bills” is misleading - net zero abandonment would not cut bills. There is nothing on threats to rural schools, shaky public transport, social-care, under-financed and democratically enfeebled local government.

Reform remains basically a single-issue party, identifying heavily with immigration, border control and deportation of “illegal migrants”. It contains little of targeted relevance to rural Ceredigion, Carmarthenshire, Powys and Gwynedd.

Voters in the new horribly outsize constituencies of Ceredigion Penfro, Sir Gaerfyrddin, Gwynedd Maldwyn and Brycheiniog Tawe Nedd need to take note. If rural Wales is all but omitted at this stage of the proceedings, that begins to look like indifference.

Farage gives no indication that either he or his acolytes are sensitive to the historic significance to Wales of May’s polling, indicating an absence of the depth and experience any party needs if it’s to deliver competent government.

It’s this detachment which, quite late in the day, voters in Wales may, finally, be picking up on, Reform dropping from 29% to 23% in a new ITV Cymru /YouGov poll.

Plaid Cymru rockets ahead at 37%, with the Green Party, for the first time ever, third at 13%. Level with the Conservatives, Labour is fourth - its lowest-ever point - at 10%. Lib-Dems are at a dismaying 5%.

What’s shocking is how anyone in Wales can have been taking Reform seriously, except as a protest against Labour’s shortcomings. The trouble is that a protest vote in a real live election could produce nasty surprises. As a piece of advice to the disgruntled, ‘be careful what you wish for’ could turn out to be very inadequate.

Reform’s proper fate is oblivion in Room 101. Nowhere else measures up to an outfit basically little more than a soap kept on air by the now - going by the ITV poll - fading charisma of a single player, a grouping predominantly of ex-Tories looking for political preferment under a flag of novelty. Less a party, this is more a club for the disenchanted.

THIS ELECTION will be the first following a vast, and controversial, expansion of the Senedd - from 60 to 96 members - and the first to adopt an all-out party-list voting system, as well as a reduction in the number of constituencies and an election cycle cut from five years to four.

It amounts to a political earthquake which, for Farage, is little more than a sideshow.

Witness an interview with BBC Wales in the autumn, when he was asked about his policies for Wales. “Hang on a sec, it’s mid-October,” he said, as if the question was a bit outlandish. “The elections are a very, very long way away.” Seasoned politicians, Nige, would see seven months as last-minute.

He insisted Reform was taking the Senedd campaign seriously and that he had a “full-time team” working on policies but, revealingly, he volunteered: “Every election I fight is political theatre to get ahead in Westminster”. So, for Farage, May’s election appears no more than a stepping-stone which could end on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street.

Reform’s latest leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, a former Wales MEP, was in September jailed for 10-and-a-half-years over acceptance of bribes to make pro-Russian statements in the European Parliament. The fact that no-one has been appointed to replace him hardly suggests a party with a keen Welsh focus.

I asked Stewart Marchant, a Carmarthenshire businessman and the party’s Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire chair, about a successor for Gill, and about policies specific to rural Wales. So far, there’s been no reply.

Across Wales as a whole, Reform wants to establish a Welsh Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), mimicking the notorious US initiative headed by Elon Musk, which caused mass layoffs and job-cuts. Farage has said: “It will help us uncover where there is woke and wasteful spending and we will make sure those funds are redirected to frontline services.” And, presumably, God help the unsuspecting casualties, the ordinary working people, tossed aside.

He wants to reopen the Port Talbot steelworks. After all the agony it’s been through, is that what Port Talbot wants? And, selectively, a revival of coal-mining. “Just like that!”, as Welsh magician-comedian Tommy Cooper, in his red fez, might have chortled. Where is the popular demand for reopening pits?

TUC Cymru warns that Farage plans for industrial Wales pose “the biggest threat” of any political party, with a policy to end investment into clean industrial upgrades assessed as threatening 39,873 jobs in Wales.

Carmarthenshire is among local authority areas most vulnerable to industry job-losses, with TUC analysis showing that over 2,000 jobs could be at risk.

A 23% vote share is a clear threat to Wales’s future well-being. The country really needs to wake up to the fact..