Calum Davies is a Conservative councillor in Cardiff and former Senedd candidate.

Last month saw the Senedd return from recess and two major developments concerning the big winners of May’s election. However, it was not necessarily to the benefit of either.

The first was the inaugural gathering of nationalist first ministers in Cardiff. As a Welshman that loves Britain, the prospect of such an image has given me cold shivers, unlike Russia’s Foreign Minister who ensured the summit was well covered on TVs in his country.

I’ve always thought of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish nationalists calling each other “” a bit odd. Sure, they all hate England enough to want to separate from them, but that also means leaving a union with each other. They do not desire a new Celtic nation, but three new states. Indeed, Sinn Fein do not even want independence for Northern Ireland but to have it subsumed into another. They’re not just there saying ‘we don’t want to be part of the same country as the English,’ they are saying, ‘I don’t want to be part of the same country as the guy next to me’.

In Wales, this excited the separatists who felt it was a significant moment, as it finally saw them elevated to equal status with their nationalist counterparts. Yet, the fervour for this provocative display has arguably backfired.

Rhun ap Iorwerth was at pains to stress during the election campaign that independence was off the table. Alongside others, I have been warning for years that all Unionists should be wary that any decision and action taken by the nationalists should be viewed through the lens of their ultimate goal. You give the separatists an electoral inch and they will take a constitutional mile.

Like the SNP in 2007, Plaid wanted people to think that separation was not on the agenda because they knew it was a hindrance to their electoral prospects. Plaid only won the election this year on the explicit basis that it would pursue independence. In essence, it was necessary for the nationalists to temporarily repudiate their to enter office.

The meeting led to easy attacks in the Senedd. The message was that Plaid lied to voters and were getting distracted from their day job and their mandate by focussing on their obsession of breaking up the Union. This was the majority view of those vox-popped by BBC Wales in Cwmbran a couple of weeks ago. It has not sat well with Welsh veterans either, given that Plaid cosied up to Sinn Fein – the political wing of the IRA.

During the election campaign, I was stunned by the amount of people who were fooled by Plaid’s messaging. How could they really believe a party will abandon its longest and most sincerely held ambition? How could they not see that a push for independence was the inevitable outcome of electing a nationalist government? Do these people think Scotland has a political system worth replicating?

The answer is multi-faceted: most people don’t pay close attention to politics, we all have a strong ability to ignore inconvenient truths when it helps us lean into what we do like, and the sub-par checks-and-balances of devolution mean facts often go without sufficient scrutiny.

The point I am making is that this was entirely predictable. I just hope voters will learn that Plaid cannot be trusted when it comes to the next set of elections. The second development was also something many foresaw far in advance – significant breaks in the ranks of Reform.

Sarah Lesadd-Cooper not only left the party after only four months as an MS, but she defected straight to Plaid Cymru. How did someone end up leaving a supposedly anti-establishment, radical right, Unionist party for a hard-left, nationalist party entrenched in the Welsh elite?

Cooper was elected as the second list candidate for Reform in the Bridgend & Vale of Glamorgan seat. However, this was only after four people got thrown off or resigned from it after the initial announcement of candidates. To demonstrate the poor quality of selecting for this seat, the eventual top-ranked individual has recently been exposed making pro-trans comments in sharp contrast to his party’s position on such matters.

Cooper was lucky to have chosen a seat with such chaotic personalities. To be fair, as a young, female care leaver, she gave Reform a chance to diversify their candidate offering beyond the cliches.

But once the dust settled after the election, it had become clear to those who follow Welsh politics that she was suspect number one for Reform’s first defection – although a move straight to her party’s antithesis was not on the cards. Being open to working with others in pursuit of your goals is tolerable, but when coupled with a lack of enthusiasm about the central tenants of your party’s platform, you go from asset to risk.

Reform’s Senedd group is the party in a microcosm: divided between the populist, anti-establishment wing who want to expose how corporate capture and hyper-liberalism is destroying the country and those who wish to engage with the system on a sincere basis, who just want to try and be a good opposition party and represent an alternative view without actually making themselves outcasts among MSs outside of Reform. Oh, and all this happened on the same day Dan Thomas resigned as leader of Reform Wales.

It brings to mind the classic bind that the Welsh Conservatives found themselves in during devolution. Unable to influence developments while the left connived to push their own agenda, the Tories provided nominal opposition without ever challenging the fundamentals that uphold the entire system. Used and abused by the devo-regime, they lost purpose and then support. I remain in the party because I believe it will have no choice but to overcome its pro-devolution delusion or surrender the last vestiges of relevance in Wales. It has not gone unnoticed that the Party here is polling 50% higher in general election voting intentions than devolved ones.

So having spent the last few years calling Conservatives traitors, failures, and untrustworthy, it seems Reform are determined to follow them down the exact same path. Not content with just copying the Tory manifesto, alienating their own members and voters by defying their desire to abolish national devolution, and taking on many of their former ranks, Reform under its new leader is edging towards getting coopted by the very system that shuts them out and implements the very things that they despise and denigrate.

The above case shows the very purpose of Reform is already subject to live internal debate. We all know Reform want to replace the Conservatives, but I thought they wanted to be better and different – otherwise what is the point of them? They do not represent change.