JESTERS in bright blue suits with fruit-cake voices and avuncular personas should sensibly be seen as no more than passing sources of entertainment.

Nigel Farage, after all, leads a single-issue party demonstrably bereft of ideas about anything at all beyond immigration. His abiding nightmare must be that he wakes up one morning and finds his party in power, whether in Wales or the UK.

Dabbing a sweaty forehead, he wails: “Yes, but what do I do now?”

Regardless, a recent ITV Cymru Wales poll shows Reform with a huge 29 per cent of the vote, a shade behind Plaid Cymru’s 30pc and a mile in front of a limping 14pc Labour. (The Tories gathered 11pc and Greens and Lib Dems 6pc each.)

Despite this showing, it would be a mistake for Labour or Plaid to see Reform’s Senedd voting intention performance as a reflection of public confidence in its overall political credibility or stature. Practical politics suggests Labour could well see voters, certainly in rural Wales, returning to the party if deep public concerns about the NHS and social care were fixed. In the case of a large chunk of mid and west Wales, remove the threat to Bronglais Hospital’s stroke unit and sort out ambulance waiting-times and bed-blocking and the electoral dividend could be dramatic.

Take account of the fact that it’s not only disappointed Labour voters seeking solutions to bread-and-butter problems, but equally Conservatives, a good number of whom in rural Wales are drifting, albeit unwillingly, towards Reform.

Work out the public’s priorities in other parts of Wales too, and act on them, and the Farage vote could be shredded.

People want positive advancements, but if they aren’t on the agenda there’s a danger they’ll fall back on succumbing to Reform’s single message of crisis and fear. Farage raises the spectre of “major civil disorder” unless anti-migrant demands are met. But hold on. Support may rest on shifting sands.

For example, a survey by polling and market research agency Survation found that a quarter of voters believe people crossing the English Channel in small boats make up the largest share of UK migrants. In fact, according to the House of Commons Library, they account for slightly less than four per cent.

Forty-four per cent think the bulk of migrants are refugees and asylum-seekers, whereas the true figure is 16 per cent. A YouGov poll discovers nearly half of the public believe most migrants here are “illegal”, whereas the vast majority have arrived legally.

Meanwhile, Labour’s list of failings in Wales is lengthy, and includes long-term neglect and sidelining of the NHS in rural mid Wales, and a feeble refusal to speak out clearly over genocide in Gaza, even though in Wales the humanitarian instinct runs deep. Where is the Welsh government’s opposition to the proscription as a terrorist organisation of the direct action movement Palestine Action, a non-violent group so often characterised by shuffling octogenarians on walking-sticks interested only in an end to mass bloodshed?

Where its protests over Britain’s unconscionable continuing sale of crucial spare parts for Israel’s F-35 fighter jets, whose murderous forays are cutting down Palestinian civilians whose only offence is wishing to escape ceaseless slaughter in their homeland and to live a quiet life?

Yet it would be rash to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Wales under Labour is the only part of the UK to have free school meals for all primary schoolchildren, free prescriptions for anyone in need, a ‘living wage’ - admittedly inadequate - for care-workers and free bus-passes for all 60-year-olds. Reform supporters need to be careful what they wish for.

AFTER YEARS of showing minimal interest in the multiple tribulations of people in her Mid and West Wales constituency, Eluned Morgan suddenly gets hot under the collar over Ceredigion parking charges. An election must be on its way,

This is so obviously a vote-garnering manoeuvre, it’s embarrassing. It invites ridicule, because it’s cack-handed.

A year ago, the tactic may have worked in the first minister’s favour. After all, no-one’s going to disagree when she says car-parks price increases are a ‘disaster’ for the local economy.

But her timing is awash with cynicism, such that even the most generous-hearted voter isn’t going to be fooled. If, with an election on the horizon, a member of the Senedd suddenly takes a close interest in a local controversy, it doesn’t take a John Curtice to work out why.

Of course, no-one’s going to disagree that here’s an arrogant ivory tower council cabinet contemptuously ignoring a flood of public protest and making people, imminently, start paying £5 a time to park on Aberystwyth promenade. When at the moment it’s free. And always has been.

By itself that’s plenty bad enough. This ‘ignore-the-masses’ Plaid Cymru authority sets aside, without empathy, the objections of a population which has always enjoyed its right to congregate on the seafront, go for a walk and socialise or just sit and watch the world go by. It’s a very long tradition, stretching back close on 150 years. People often drive to the prom as part of exercising this right.

Denial of this entrenched entitlement will, quite correctly, be seen as another step in an undesirable process of creeping comprehensive control of the individual by governmental and commercial forces.

The new charges aren’t just a tax on the simplest of pleasures. They will also, as even the county council acknowledges, infuriate commuters and deter visitors. Which is pretty rich for a council which knows full well the economic importance of tourism.

But for a cabinet closeted in hermetically-sealed isolation, on a permanent high about the scope of its intimidation-sustained authority, unchallenged by hopelessly cowed Lib Dems and Independents, none of this matters. They’re on the inside, from where power is exercised, so excitingly, by clicks on keyboards. And the hordes outside? They can be left to shout their heads off.

This is textbook authoritarianism at its worst, allowed to let rip both by unforgivably weak backbench Plaid councillors and by the vast majority of subservient Lib Dems and Indies, content to bend the knee to cabinet and executive.

Beyond the council chamber, wider Plaid Cymru sits back and does nothing to push for party, and democratic, dignity in the face of outrageous domination by an unelected, and emboldened, executive. By rights, grass-roots Plaid voters should exact a penalty for this docility. But history suggests they won’t.