The Liberal Democrats took the seat from the Conservatives after sitting MP Chris Davies was convicted of expenses fraud. They overturned a majority of about 8,000, with new MP Jane Dodds securing about 1,400 more votes than Davies, who decided to stand again. Labour did badly, barely holding their deposit. The Brexit Party took 10% of the vote.

These are the facts.

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How the Left lost Wales

By James Bloodworth

They are, variously, proof of the following:

1. The Brexit Party is successfully putting pressure on Boris Johnson, denying him wiggle room and helping guarantee we leave on October 31.

2. The Brexit Party is making it harder for Boris Johnson to get us out of the EU, by replacing a Brexiteer MP with an ardent Remainer.

3. The Conservative vote held up well considering the MP had been convicted of expenses fraud.

4. The Conservatives only squeezed the Brexit Party down to 10% because the sitting MP was so popular locally.

5. The Liberal Democrats are the strongest Remain party and as head of a Remain alliance can become the new main party of opposition.

6. Remain parties got substantially fewer votes than Leave parties, so being the “party of Remain” is never going to work for the Lib Dems.

7. Labour’s collapsing in Wales.

8. Labour needs to adopt a clear policy to remain.

9. Labour needs to adopt a clear policy to leave.

10. Labour needs to ditch Jeremy Corbyn.

The only topic on which there appears to be consensus is that Brecon and Radnorshire is a particularly beautiful part of the country, even if some of its towns and villages remain entirely unpronounceable to the travelling activists who turned up over the last months. The best moment of the night was when the High Sheriff of Powys decided to read out the results exclusively in Welsh, leaving the scores of English speakers in a state of pale-faced panic about who had really won.

But among all this arguing, there’s a lot of clarity. Liberal Democrats are joyful and optimistic. They know what to do next: double down as the party of Remain, stake their claim as the leader of the Remain alliance, and try to get other parties and other MPs to join them. Full steam ahead.

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How the Lib Dems could seize power

By James Kirkup

The Conservatives have plenty to console themselves with. I don’t think their strategy was up for debate, but even if it were, the result gives them a clear rationale for pursuing it. Squeeze the Brexit vote, put the Leave coalition back together, and let the Remainers and the moderates go. Full steam ahead.

The only party that deserves to be confused this morning is Labour. Labour used to own Wales: they have topped the poll in seats and votes in every general election in my lifetime, and beyond it. Perhaps Brecon and Radnorshire isn’t a particular stronghold for the party, but to clock in only 5.3% of the vote is truly abysmal.

Brexit is the defining issue of the decade, and it is a binary one. In or out. Leave or Remain. The two camps are getting more and more entrenched in their positions, and Labour’s attempt to straddle both is killing them. They have managed to contort themselves in a way that makes almost everyone who cares about Brexit angry, hoping perhaps that Brexit would no longer be a big deal by the time of the General Election.

But Brecon and Radnorshire makes it harder than ever to avoid a General Election this autumn, before Brexit has happened. In a Brexit election, I struggle to see how Labour avoids tearing itself apart. Too Leave-ish for the Remainers, and too Remain-ish for the Leavers. In politics, you have to take a side. Labour needs to make its choice, before it is too late.

It was easily missed. None of the Sunday papers trailed it, apart from the Express. And today it has been consigned to the inner pages of the dailies.

Yet while most of the country was out enjoying the sunshine, over 5,000 Brexit Party supporters made their way to the NEC in Birmingham to watch Nigel Farage present his economic agenda for beyond Brexit and vision for the long-term future of his movement. Boris Johnson is in his sights.

It says much about the bizarre state of today’s politics, that this newly minted party’s ability to summon such a crowd on a sunny Sunday barely merits mention. It’s another reminder that while Westminster is looking the other way, Mr Farage is building a national movement to rival any of the major parties.

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How Farage outflanked everyone

By Matthew Goodwin

A few on Twitter have noticed, and drawn rather hysterical comparisons with the Second World War. As I watched it being livestreamed, the atmosphere seemed to be more frenetic than sinister, attempting, not entirely successfully, to replicate an American political rally. The mainly middle-aged English crowd were given glowsticks (in Brexit turquoise, of course) and told to wave them in total darkness to the unlikely sounds of techno music and American hip-hop. “Its like a disco!” laughed Farage as he walked on stage.

Then came his survival plan for a Boris Johnson era.

The central plank of Boris’s candidacy is that he and only he can see off the threat from the Brexit Party. It’s why Tory MPs came into line for him in their droves; it’s why he looks set to become prime minister. Farage clearly has other ideas.

Before yesterday’s event I was already sceptical of the logic. Even if the Conservatives were able to win back every single defector to the Brexit Party and reassemble their 2017 coalition, it would still leave them without a functional majority (and they will have haemorrhaged many more Remain-voting Conservatives along the way).

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What Rory Stewart got right

By Freddie Sayers

Last week’s voting intention poll from YouGov – taken during blanket Boris Johnson media coverage and a near-universal expectation that he will become pm – shows the Tories and Brexit party level-pegging at 22% each, a shift of 3% in the Conservatives’ favour. If the front-runner were such catnip to Brexit party voters, you would expect to see a more substantial drift than that.

The presumption is that Farage would be keen to do a deal with Johnson and go into coalition with him. On the evidence of yesterday, he’s not planning to make it easy for him: “Mr Johnson, you can try if you want to, but I will not be put back in my box by you or anybody else.”

First, he made clear that any version of Theresa May’s deal that Boris manages to pass, however amended, will be declared a betrayal and will serve to supercharge the Brexit Party: “It’s not a deal, its Monsieur Barnier’s new European Treaty… it must never pass in this country.”

The only scenario in which Mr Farage offered (in an arch reference to Donald Trump’s meeting with the North Korean leader), a “meeting in the demilitarised zone”, would be if Boris successfully delivered a no-deal Brexit. That means not just making no-deal Brexit his policy, but actually managing to deliver it and remaining in office.

This is such a remote scenario, and one that would be accompanied by such political and economic turbulence, that the Brexit Party leader is clearly not losing sleep over it.

Secondly, his policy agenda explicitly casts the Brexit Party as the party of the regions, pitted against an over-dominant capital. “As London grows richer, as London grows bigger, as London grows more powerful, so much of the rest of this country feels left behind,” Farage said.

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How long will the Brexit Party last?

By Peter Franklin

The central platform is a £200bn regional investment fund, funded by scrapping HS2 (on the grounds that it only brings wealthy people to London faster), halving the foreign aid budget (no more sending money overseas) and withholding the £39bn payment to the EU.

In this hypothetical Brexit Party world, the money would go instead on removing business rates entirely outside London to revive small retailers and regional highstreets, improving transport from east to west across the North (ie avoiding London) and investing in high-speed internet and mobile phone connectivity in deprived regions across the country.

Never mind that the sums are highly dubious; the politics are significant. Farage’s offer is a hybrid of anti-corporate populism and Thatcherite appeal to small business owners. He is responding to a deeply held feeling across the country that London has benefited over recent decades as the regions have declined. And crucially it makes Boris Johnson, inextricably associated with London as its twice-elected Mayor, a highly vulnerable adversary.

Farage has worked out Boris Johnson’s greatest potential weakness among this audience: he’s a quintessential metropolitan liberal. It is often forgotten as he talks up proroguing parliament to deliver no deal and does his best to associate himself with Winston Churchill.

But you would struggle to find a more cosmopolitan, international, fancy-talking, London-loving politician in all England. If Farage can successfully make it a wider contest based on region and class, he could put Boris on the ropes from the outset and rob him of the raison-d’être of his leadership.