A WEST Wales man who offered hundreds of pounds for arson to be committed on his behalf has been jailed for 11 years, and handed a 20-year restraining order to protect the victim.

Michael Arundel, of Tycroes, Carmarthenshire, was found to have used the Telegram app to send messages to an audience of over 1,000 people asking for a car and house to be set on fire in February and April of this year.

When he was arrested by Dyfed-Powys Police, he was in possession of cocaine worth up to £62,500.

The 34-year-old of Mynyddbach was brought to police attention following a car fire on his street on February 28, 2024.

Witnesses reported seeing a man throw something at the black Audi before it ‘immediately exploded’ and the suspect ran away. When the owner of the car followed him, he recognised the suspect as being linked to Arundel.

It was later discovered that Arundel had sent messages inciting arson using the Telegram app. On examining his phone, police found the following messages from February 28:

• 7.07pm: ‘Anyone looking to make money? Car set on fire in Ammanford. Don’t waste my time I want it asap.’
• 7.09pm: ‘1^st person come set the Audi outside on fire I’ll personally come give you £200 cash.’
• 7.10pm: ‘If you’re not available tonight don’t stress. I’ll pay you £200 tomorrow night to do the house windows. I don’t f*** about and I don’t do things by half.’

He then threatened that if someone accepted the offer but didn’t commit the crime, he would ‘focus his attention’ on their house, before increasing his payment to £300.

As a result of this incident, police began to monitor the Telegram app, with their attention drawn to similar messages posted on April 26.

• 7.02pm: ‘Need a house set on fire. Cash ready … Tycroes area. Nice amount of cash for this job.’
• 7.03pm: photos of money bags
• 8.16pm: ‘Cash was paid … that last job is sorted. Watch what happens tonight (two laughing emojis)
• 8.17pm a series of emojis depicting three houses, three fires, three cars and three fires

Due to the high risk of the threats, Dyfed-Powys Police deployed two double crewed vehicles to the area.

A further message was sent in response to the police presence:

• 8.23pm: Feds all over the place (two laughing emojis). Those police vans won’t stay there all night … soon as they’re gone it will happen mark my words! If they do wait all night … it will happen tomorrow. You can’t delay the inevitable!! It’s happening 100%

Despite Arundel’s confidence, the attack was prevented by a prompt police response and the heightened presence of officers in the area.

Three days later, police on patrol in Llanelli spotted Arundel and knowing he was wanted for questioning, pulled up next to him in their car. Realising they were officers, Arundel made off down Marble Hall Road, refusing to stop when requested.

As he was running, he tried to take a plastic bag out of his pocket with the intention of discarding it, and subsequently fell over. The officers caught up with Arundel and managed to restrain him.

They retrieved the plastic bag which contained a white rock, later established to be a half kilo block of cocaine with a street value of up to £62,500, and also found a digital weighing scale in Arundel’s pocket.

He was arrested on suspicion of possessing a class A drug with intent to supply and conspiracy to commit arson.

It was discovered Arundel had booked into a hotel in Llanelli, where a phone was seized. Officers searched his home, seizing two phones, as well as his business address where they seized a phone, laptop, police issue fleece and hi-vis vest, weighing scales and a clear bag with traces of white powder. Herbal cannabis and an air rifle were also confiscated from a garage.

Further enquiries into the Telegram account being used by Arundel found evidence of cocaine, cannabis, ketamine and MDMA being offered for supply between August 2023 and April 2024.

He was ultimately charged with five counts of supplying class A drugs, and two counts of encouraging the commission of arson in the Ammanford area, pleading guilty to all charges thanks to the strength of police evidence against him.

On Friday, July 5 Arundel appeared at Swansea Crown Court, where he was sentenced to a total of 11 years in prison. He was also handed a 20-year restraining order to protect the arson victim.

Detective Chief Inspector Rich Lewis said: “We are really pleased with the sentence handed to Arundel today. This has been an in-depth investigation with unusual circumstances in that the defendant was encouraging others to commit crimes on his behalf.

“The strength of evidence gathered was so strong that Arundel admitted all seven crimes, when clearly he had thought he could get away with offending if someone else committed the arson attack.

“These incidents could have had serious consequences, and it is very fortunate nobody was hurt by Arundel’s reckless behaviour.”

THIS general election is the most disproportional on record in terms of votes cast matching seats in Parliament, analysis from the Electoral Reform Society has found.

Yesterday’s election result is the most disproportional in British electoral history according to two separate DV (deviation from proportionality) scores , which are used to measure how proportional elections are in terms of seats in parliament matching the percentage of votes each party receives.

With a DV score of 30, the 2024 election was found to have beaten the previously most disproportional election, which was 2015 with a score of 24, according to the Loosemore-Hanby measure. The third most disproportional result according to this measure is 1983, which had a DV score of 23.

Yesterday’s general election was also found to be the most disproportional on the Gallagher method of DV score , with a score of 24. The second most disproportional election on this measure is 1983 with a score of 20.6.

The results today saw the Labour Party win 64% of seats (412) with just under 34% of the votes. Meanwhile, Reform UK and the Green Party won just 8 seats (just over 1%) between them with over 20% of the vote share combined.

Research by the Electoral Reform Society also showed that Labour won an MP for every 24,000 votes they received, compared to one for every 49,000 for the Lib Dems, one MP for every 56,000 votes for the Conservatives, one for every 485,000 votes for the Greens and one for every 1,000,000 for Reform.

Yesterday’s vote also saw a number of electoral firsts which contributed to how disproportional the result was. For instance, this was the first election where four parties received over 10% of the vote and the first where five parties received over 5%.

It was also the election where Labour and the Conservatives received their joint lowest vote share on record, with a combined 57.4%. The second lowest combined vote share for the two parties was in 2010 when they received 65.1%.

However, this election is not an outlier result. Other recent general elections have produced disproportional results. The last three general elections have seen a winning majority gained on just 36.9% of the vote in 2015, a minority government on 42.4% of the vote in 2017 and an 80-seat majority achieved on a vote share increase of just 1.3 percent in 2019.

Yesterday’s unprecedented disproportional result comes as there is growing – and now majority – support for electoral reform in the country.

Meanwhile, the National Centre for Social Research found trust in politics has recently sunk to record lows, a problem the ERS has long argued is exacerbated by people not feeling their votes count under the First Past the Post voting system

ERS research found that at the last general election in 2019 over 22 million votes (70.8%) didn’t count towards the result, in that they were either cast for a losing candidate or surplus votes for the winner [9].

Darren Hughes, Chief Executive of the Electoral Reform Society said: “We have just witnessed the most disproportional election on record in terms of the votes people cast translating into seats in Parliament. It is clear that the British public is already voting as if we have a proportional system. For instance, this was the first election ever where four parties got over 10% of the vote share.

“The two-party voting system no longer reflects the way the country is voting. This is why the First Past the Post voting system used for Westminster is becoming more unstable and producing volatile results, and why millions of people’s votes effectively didn’t count towards securing any representation in Parliament yesterday.

“This disproportionality is now a feature rather than a bug of the current voting system. We now need to move to a proportional voting system for Westminster to ensure that Parliament accurately represents how the country voted, and that everyone’s vote counts towards the result no matter where they live.”

THE CONSERVATIVES were wiped out in Wales for the first time since 2001 in an election that poses as many questions as it answers.Labour’s percentage of the Welsh vote usually easily outstrips the Party’s in the rest of the UK. However, an unpopular Welsh Government led by an even more unpopular First Minister saw Labour’s share of the vote decline across Wales, even as it picked up seats.

Plaid Cymru did better than expected. The Party of Wales won four seats, two of them, Ceredigion & Preseli and Dwyfor Meirionydd, by huge margins that suggest it now has a pair of safe seats for the first time in the Party’s history.
Although national polls predicted a Labour win in Caerfyrddin, the parties’ canvass returns in Carmarthenshire did not lie. The Labour vote fell back in our eastern neighbour, while Plaid increased its vote share by a small proportion to retain Jonathan Edwards’ former seat.

On Ynys Mon, a surge in support for Reform UK almost certainly handed Plaid Cymru’s Llinos Medi victory by 1500 votes over former Conservative MP Virginia Crosbie. Ynys Mon also saw the Labour vote drop in one of the few three-way marginals in the UK.
Alun Cairns, Stephen Crabb, David TC Davies, and Simon Hart – all former Welsh Secretaries, lost their seats. In the case of the first two former Secretaries of State, the margin was around 1500 votes, with Reform scoring well and proving the difference between their return and a Labour gain.

Labour threw the kitchen sink in their successful effort to eject the combative David TC Davies from Monmouthshire and – on changed boundaries – succeeded by around 3,000 votes.

It would have taken a miracle for Simon Hart, who accepted the most difficult of the four challenges by standing in Carmarthenshire, to return to the Commons. The miracle didn’t come. Reform took 8,000 votes from Labour and the Conservatives, and Simon Hart’s frontline political career is almost certainly over.

The seat held by another former Conservative Secretary of State for Wales, David Jones, was divided between three new constituencies, each of which returned a Labour representative.

The Liberal Democrat vote bombed across most of Wales. However, the Party regained the redrawn Brecon & Radnor seat from the Conservatives. The margin of victory, fewer than 1500 votes, was well within the number of votes Reform gained in the new constituency.
In Montgomeryshire, the MP at the centre of a betting scandal, Craig Williams, deservedly lost his seat, being beaten into third place behind Labour’s Stephen Witherden and Reform UK’s Oliver Lewis. Mr Williams now finds himself free to spend as much time at William Hill’s as he likes.

The Welsh picture overall looks superficially good for Labour, at least in terms of seats won. However, turnout was 56.6% across the whole country, and Labour’s share of the vote fell.

The vote shares for what we must now consider Wales’s five principal parties are revealing.

Labour got 37% of the vote in Wales, Plaid around 15%, the Conservatives around 18%, Reform 17%, and the Liberal Democrats 6.5%.
However, in polling for a Senedd election in 2026, a poll conducted for Barn Cymru, Labour’s vote share is 27%, with the Conservatives comfortably outpolling their Westminster result, and Plaid’s vote share solidly increased.

First Minister Vaughan Gething has claimed Wales will have a “true partner” in Keir Starmer.

In a post published to X, he said: “After fourteen long years, today we begin a new chapter for Wales.

“Your Labour Government will have a true partner in Keir Starmer as we build the fairer, greener future Wales deserves.
“Two Labour governments working together for a stronger Wales in a fairer Britain. Change begins here.”

However, working together will mean Labour in Wales abandoning some key policy pledges. UK Labour will not return full control of structural funds to Cardiff Bay. Even overnight, Labour MPs fought shy of any suggestion the Welsh Government would get full autonomy over it, as it enjoyed pre-2017.

The Welsh Government’s loud and persistent calls for a share of HS2 funding have also gone out of the window, even at the dramatically reduced £350m (down from almost £4bn) it now claims would be due to Cardiff Bay. The long-hoped-for sweetie of more funding for public services in Wales – specifically for Education spending and Health – will likely be far less than Labour in Wales hoped and will probably not all go into those spending pots.

The Barnett Formula, which decides how much Wales gets as a percentage of what is spent in England, will be “reviewed”. However, a change to a formula based on need – if a change takes place – is years away.

Despite their Welsh wipeout, the Conservatives now have a rare opportunity to take a long look at how they organise and campaign in Wales. Like “Welsh Labour”, the “Welsh Conservatives” are little more than a branch office for Westminster.

If the Conservatives find an authentic Welsh voice, as opposed to merely parroting the attack lines from Conservative Central OfficeHQ, they could regain ground as Labour in Wales struggles with Vaughan Gething’s electorally poisonous reputation and dissatisfaction with a quarter of a century of devolution. If they don’t, Plaid and Reform will benefit.

Reform must now try to organise and professionalise itself for the next Senedd elections. It can’t afford the omnishambles that engulfed its predecessor party between 2016 and 2021 or sit back and expect voters to flock to it.

As an almost explicitly English National Party, Reform must also consider how it will build an offer to appeal to Welsh voters on issues within the Welsh Government’s control.

Meanwhile, Plaid must consider both how to extend its reach in Labour-voting areas and consolidate its position in places where it is already strong. Rhun ap Iorwerth comes out of the campaign with considerable public credit in the bank. It is vitally important to Plaid that they build on his appeal and ability to communicate with voters in a way recent Plaid leaders have not.

For Mr ap Iorwerth, the main challenge is likely to come from within his own Party’s NEC, which is more focused on internal squabbles on single issues than fighting elections on a broad platform.