It was almost certainly the last ever by-election in Wales for the Senedd. A new electoral system next year will mean they aren't needed, but they have saved the most dramatic for last. Labour held the seat of Caerphilly at Westminster since 1918, and in Cardiff Bay since devolution in 1999. 

Last night, Labour collapsed to a poor third and although Reform surged to over a third of the vote, Plaid won. 

All this with the highest ever turnout in a Senedd by-election.

For Welsh Labour it leaves them struggling to pass a budget and facing a historically bad result next May. For Keir Starmer it also poses difficult questions - can you be the "Stop Farage" party, when voters who want to stop Nigel Farage don't like you very much? 

In the UK, the new Green Party leader Zack Polanski is emerging as a charismatic, bold, and unapologetic political force. His outspoken stance against the Gaza genocide and his proposal to impose steep taxes on the wealthy has made him a star in British politics — rattling both Labour and Conservative establishments, and rising in the polls. He talks to Mehdi Hasan and paid Zeteo subscribers in an exclusive live Q&A town hall on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, Gaza, immigration, what he thinks about being compared to Zohran Mamdani, and more.

On the rise of the UK establishment parroting the far-right’s racist and Islamophobic views, Polanski tells Mehdi: “It’s phenomenally dangerous, and Islamophobia is rife in our society. And I say this as a Jewish man, there’s only been five Jewish leaders of a British political party in the last hundred years, so I obviously take anti-Semitism really seriously.” However, he adds, the UK government and media’s “constant conflation” of British Jews with Israelis “does make me feel less safe as a Jewish person, because I look at what Netanyahu and Gallant do.”