Tories suffer first Welsh wipeout since 2001

Craig Williams, second from left, watches on as Labour's Steve Witherden speaks after victory

The Conservatives have been wiped out in Wales.

At the 2019 general election, the party won 14 of Wales' 40 seats.

This time round, because of boundary changes, there were 32 seats up for grabs, and they won none of them.

The last Welsh result to be declared was in Monmouthshire, where Welsh Secretary David TC Davies lost after conceding his own defeat as soon as the exit poll predicted a Labour landslide.

Mr Davies is the first sitting Welsh secretary to lose his seat since the office was created in 1964.

There are echoes of the 1997 election when Tony Blair came to power in a landslide - as Sir Keir Starmer has done this time - and Wales had no Conservative MPs elected.

That was repeated in the second Blair election win in 2001. It meant that Wales had no Tory MPs from 1997 to 2005.

Former Conservative Welsh Secretaries Stephen Crabb, Simon Hart and Alun Cairns also all lost their seats at this election.

David TC Davies, Welsh secretary in Rishi Sunak's cabinet, at the Monmouthshire count, where he lost his seat

Although Craig Williams was standing as an independent in Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr this was essentially a Tory defeat.

Mr Williams, who was an aide to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, held the seat for the Conservatives in the last Parliament, but had party support withdrawn after he admitted betting on the date of the election.

One Conservative has said there is a danger that with what the Scottish Tories called an "historically bad night" they will be "an England-only party".

That, they said, was not "a good look" for the party of the UK union.