Senate Member
Posts: 6,009 
April 21st, 2007, 06:36 AM
Meet the extremely eccentric Welsh politician, Dai Llewellyn, a member of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), the party that wants Britain out of the EU. He is standing in the Cardiff North constituency for UKIP and shows that Britain still has its crazy eccentrics.....
Would you vote for dirty Dai?
by ROBERT HARDMAN
20th April 2007
Rake, drunk, rampant lothario - but apart from that, Dai Llewellyn is no ordinary politician. So will he seduce the voters as easily as his countless conquests?
The election candidate walks into the butcher's shop and surveys the immaculate spread of lamb chops and sausages.
At this point, most politicians would make some grovelling remark about the food and ask the butcher for his vote.
This, though, is no ordinary candidate.
"Got any squashed badger?" he asks the speechless butcher. "I like it really crispy."
Over the road, he invents a new policy as he enters a video hire shop: "Elect me and I'll make sure that anyone who doesn't rewind their tapes before they bring them back is shot."
The shop is full of DVDs which don't need rewinding but the manager is too polite to point it out.
Would-be politician Dai Llewellyn is hoping to seduce the electorate of Cardiff on behalf of the United Kingdom Independence Party
Outside, a spotty youth recoils from a leaflet with the word 'Europe' on it.
"I ******* hate Europe. It's all ********," says the youth. "Hear, hear," says the candidate. "I knew I could rely on your vote." "Ooh, is that Dai Llewellyn?" a lady pensioner asks me.
I reply that it is.
"He's a one, isn't he?" She marches off laughing.
Pausing for a coffee and cigarette, the would-be Assembly Member for Cardiff North is rather enjoying this political lark.
"Do you know, I think my constituents have got prettier over the years," he observes. "But, God, some of the new buildings round here are ghastly. Have a look at the new opera house.
"Adolf would have been proud of it. That bloody Assembly's not much better. You should hear the c**p they talk in there."
He puts on his strongest Welsh accent to mimic a political debate about paperclips.
I have never encountered a would-be politician quite like Sir Dai Llewellyn. The voters of Cardiff North are equally surprised. And so are Sir Dai's family and friends.
A few weeks ago, the 'Seducer of the Valleys' was going about his usual business of international party-going, chatting up girls, descending on friends' stately homes and doing the occasional television appearance to pay the bills.
For decades, the antics of this boisterous 61-year-old baronet have entertained or shocked readers of this paper and others.
The most recent stories have featured his ongoing feud with his brother, Roddy (Princess Margaret's old flame), his latest broken engagement and the farcical scenes in a Cape Town villa in South Africa, where he was entwined with the girlfriend of a friend when the bed collapsed and he was clobbered by a wardrobe.
But, after a 'sudden conversion' to politics, he is returning to his Welsh roots and deploying his considerable reservoirs of charm in a bid to seduce the electorate of Cardiff on behalf of the United Kingdom Independence Party.
It must be said, that he has more chance of bedding a Mother Superior than being elected to the Welsh Assembly on May 3.
Cardiff North should be a straight Tory-Labour struggle in leafy suburbs. But Sir Dai could hold the balance.
At the last Assembly elections, Labour won here by just 540 votes. The UKIP candidate came last but picked up nearly 1,300 votes. What's certain is that his arrival has enlivened an election so dull that it could give a general anaesthetic a run for its money.
'Shockwaves as Sir Dai says: Wales, vote for me,' ran the front page of the Welsh daily, the Western Mail.
Inside, the paper not only devoted a whole page to the life and times of the 'high-living socialite' - complete with a picture of Sir Dai in fancy dress wearing a pink frock and a walrus moustache - but it carried a half-page editorial welcoming him to the fray.
"If it takes a man of his background to inject some extra public interest into the Assembly elections," declared the paper, "then so be it."
His opponents have endless muck to chuck at him and he cheerfully pleads guilty to most of it. For a start, he has committed the basic 21st-century sins of being a posh, Old Etonian, fox-hunting smoker.
Then there was the year when he got engaged to two - or was it three? - girls including Beatrice Welles, daughter of Orson. That one bust up when he poured a glass of brandy over her head.
His 1980 marriage to Vanessa, niece of the Duke of Norfolk, produced two daughters whom he adores, but divorce came seven years later and did little to curtail his wandering eye.
The gossip columnists nicknamed him 'Dirty Dai' and 'The Seducer of the Valleys', names which endure to this day, even if his frame is considerably larger than the one which spent all those years dodging the horsewhips of outraged husbands and fathers.
"If you seek publicity, which I do, then you can't complain when it goes against you," he says. "I was rather cross when that EastEnders chap was christened Dirty Den. It was my nickname."
He loves jokes but he is taking this electoral seduction very seriously.
"I can't bear mornings," he admits as he thrusts UKIP leaflets at commuters outside Cardiff Central railway station. He is the only candidate on show at 7.30am, though. He spots a blonde woman handing out leaflets and makes a beeline to see if she is opposition.
"Hello, we're UKIP," he cries.
The lady explains that she's with the Jehovah's Witnesses.
"Jolly good. We're the same sort of thing!" he says cheerily.
The suit is crumpled and an unsightly piece of loo paper is covering a dawn shaving disaster which has stained his shirt.
But Sir Dai is in his element.
"I wouldn't vote for you - ever!" rasps a furious-looking giant of a man with mad white hair, a beard and a donkey jacket.
"Smashing!" replies Sir Dai, delighted to have evoked such passion.
"Don't you love that?" he says as the man walks off.
"Actually, I'd be rather worried if that chap did vote for me."
His pledges in this election are to pull Britain out of the European Union and to make himself redundant. UKIP wants to scrap the £35 million-a-year Welsh Assembly and replace it with a committee of the MPs who are already being paid to represent Wales.
Sir Dai thrusts a leaflet into the hands of a young woman who tosses it aside, shouting: "But I work for the Welsh Assembly!" Sir Dai roars with laughter.
"Good for you!" he cries.
Several people recognise him from the papers and say 'hello'.
A woman stops to tell him how she was a big fan of his late father, Sir Harry Llewellyn, the gold-winning Olympic showjumper.
He has supporters, too.
"I'm right behind you," says a man called Andy Moss. "I used to vote Labour but now it's UKIP."
Unfortunately for Sir Dai, Andy wants to emigrate to Australia. Even so, the candidate is delighted.
"See? If I'm going to do damage, it will be against the socialists," he says.
But why is he bothering? Just four years ago, he announced that he was leaving Wales following arson attacks on some cottages which he owned, and would only return in a coffin. And he hasn't cast a vote since 1970. So, what has happened?
"First, I'm a lot Welsher than I sound," he says. "I was never going to leave. It was just a fit of pique after these chippy yobs tried to burn me out."
The Llewellyns are not ancient Welsh toffs. His grandfather made a mint in coal and bought the baronetcy in one of the former Prime Minister Lloyd George's notorious sale of honours.
"Better to have paid for a title than never to have one at all," says Sir Dai proudly.
"My mother's family were much grander."
His father sold the family seat years ago and Sir Dai now owns a "small house and a small piece of enclosed land' near Abertillery.
"I know it sounds nauseating," he says, emphasising the point by putting his fingers down his throat, "but I like to stay in touch with my Welshness."
The rest of the time, he lives in a rented flat in London.
"I'm as poor as a church mouse but I've had a trillionaire's life."
His last vote was for the Conservatives in 1970.
"I was utterly betrayed because Edward Heath then sold us to Europe, and what has been the point of voting since, when we don't govern ourselves?"
In the Seventies, he produced a pop record urging Britain to pull out of the Common Market.
"My instincts have always been Conservative and everyone has always said 'don't split the Conservative vote' so I haven't done - until now. But, frankly, who cares? Cameron is the same as the rest."
No Etonian loyalties then?
"I've never met him."
Sir Dai launches into a long rant about "faceless Brussels bureaucrats".
He insists he has read the Treaty of Rome and the Treaty of the European Union, and that the final straw was the Government's Sexual Orientation Regulations, pushed through Parliament without proper debate.
"Why should Christians be prosecuted for not wanting their children adopted by gays?"
A month ago, he was talking in a similar vein at a dinner where the guests included the UKIP leader, Nigel Farage. The two men hit it off and Sir Dai was persuaded to join the party. Days later, he was asked to speak at the party's spring conference.
"They gave me a standing ovation."
And here he is in a UKIP rosette fighting for the same seat which his uncle held as a Tory MP during the Fifties. After a morning of comic canvassing, the UKIP machine halts at a pub.
"I need a spot of vod to rejuvenate me," he announces, ordering a vodka and orange.
This campaign is a spin doctor's nightmare. Neither Sir Dai nor his UKIP supporters can name the sitting Assembly Member. They don't even have a map of the constituency.
How will Sir Dai live up to UKIP's pledge to slash council tax by 40per cent? He looks down gravely. 'With, er, a great deal of thought,' he replies utterly unconvincingly.
But later on, the campaign trail leads to a Baptist church hall where all the candidates have their first public debate. They are not an inspiring bunch.
As far as I can work out, Sir Dai is the only one who is not paid for by the taxpayer. The Tory candidate, Jonathan Morgan, a regional Assembly Member (as opposed to a constituency one), is the slickest - articulate, local and full of facts.
The Labour candidate, Sophie Howe, a legal services manager for the Equal Opportunities Commission, bleats the party line about improvements under Labour.
Why, she is asked, have hospital waiting times got longer? 'Because we have been focussing on well-being rather than illness,' she says. Yes, that is what she says.
The Liberal, Ed Bridges, is doing a PhD on public library provision, and the Plaid Cymru ("Party of Wales") candidate, Wyn Jones, hasn't turned up but is represented by a woman who calls herself a political theory researcher.
The Old Etonian party animal no longer seems quite so detached from the real world after all. In fact, he must be the only net contributor to the public purse.
Sir Dai turns out to be the best speaker by far, even if his theatrical rant about 'mealy-mouthed socialist claptrap' and 'faceless bureaucrats' is pretty light on facts.
Asked a question about the Kate/William saga, he replies: 'She's quite a looker so she won't have a tough time.' Hastily, he remembers that he is a politician now: 'Sorry, that's a bit lookist. But she's a lovely girl.'
He gets one of the loudest cheers of the night as he promises to 'give you back your kingdom' and demands: 'We should have a voice!'
What happens if he is actually elected to the Assembly? 'Well, I'll be here until we've scrapped it,' he says. 'But I'm certainly not missing the Monaco Grand Prix.'
dailymail.co.uk
Meet the extremely eccentric Welsh politician, Dai Llewellyn, a member of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), the party that wants Britain out of the EU. He is standing in the Cardiff North constituency for UKIP and shows that Britain still has its crazy eccentrics.....
Would you vote for dirty Dai?
by ROBERT HARDMAN
20th April 2007
Rake, drunk, rampant lothario - but apart from that, Dai Llewellyn is no ordinary politician. So will he seduce the voters as easily as his countless conquests?
The election candidate walks into the butcher's shop and surveys the immaculate spread of lamb chops and sausages.
At this point, most politicians would make some grovelling remark about the food and ask the butcher for his vote.
This, though, is no ordinary candidate.
"Got any squashed badger?" he asks the speechless butcher. "I like it really crispy."
Over the road, he invents a new policy as he enters a video hire shop: "Elect me and I'll make sure that anyone who doesn't rewind their tapes before they bring them back is shot."
The shop is full of DVDs which don't need rewinding but the manager is too polite to point it out.
Would-be politician Dai Llewellyn is hoping to seduce the electorate of Cardiff on behalf of the United Kingdom Independence Party
Outside, a spotty youth recoils from a leaflet with the word 'Europe' on it.
"I ******* hate Europe. It's all ********," says the youth. "Hear, hear," says the candidate. "I knew I could rely on your vote." "Ooh, is that Dai Llewellyn?" a lady pensioner asks me.
I reply that it is.
"He's a one, isn't he?" She marches off laughing.
Pausing for a coffee and cigarette, the would-be Assembly Member for Cardiff North is rather enjoying this political lark.
"Do you know, I think my constituents have got prettier over the years," he observes. "But, God, some of the new buildings round here are ghastly. Have a look at the new opera house.
"Adolf would have been proud of it. That bloody Assembly's not much better. You should hear the c**p they talk in there."
He puts on his strongest Welsh accent to mimic a political debate about paperclips.
I have never encountered a would-be politician quite like Sir Dai Llewellyn. The voters of Cardiff North are equally surprised. And so are Sir Dai's family and friends.
A few weeks ago, the 'Seducer of the Valleys' was going about his usual business of international party-going, chatting up girls, descending on friends' stately homes and doing the occasional television appearance to pay the bills.
For decades, the antics of this boisterous 61-year-old baronet have entertained or shocked readers of this paper and others.
The most recent stories have featured his ongoing feud with his brother, Roddy (Princess Margaret's old flame), his latest broken engagement and the farcical scenes in a Cape Town villa in South Africa, where he was entwined with the girlfriend of a friend when the bed collapsed and he was clobbered by a wardrobe.
But, after a 'sudden conversion' to politics, he is returning to his Welsh roots and deploying his considerable reservoirs of charm in a bid to seduce the electorate of Cardiff on behalf of the United Kingdom Independence Party.
It must be said, that he has more chance of bedding a Mother Superior than being elected to the Welsh Assembly on May 3.
Cardiff North should be a straight Tory-Labour struggle in leafy suburbs. But Sir Dai could hold the balance.
At the last Assembly elections, Labour won here by just 540 votes. The UKIP candidate came last but picked up nearly 1,300 votes. What's certain is that his arrival has enlivened an election so dull that it could give a general anaesthetic a run for its money.
'Shockwaves as Sir Dai says: Wales, vote for me,' ran the front page of the Welsh daily, the Western Mail.
Inside, the paper not only devoted a whole page to the life and times of the 'high-living socialite' - complete with a picture of Sir Dai in fancy dress wearing a pink frock and a walrus moustache - but it carried a half-page editorial welcoming him to the fray.
"If it takes a man of his background to inject some extra public interest into the Assembly elections," declared the paper, "then so be it."
His opponents have endless muck to chuck at him and he cheerfully pleads guilty to most of it. For a start, he has committed the basic 21st-century sins of being a posh, Old Etonian, fox-hunting smoker.
Then there was the year when he got engaged to two - or was it three? - girls including Beatrice Welles, daughter of Orson. That one bust up when he poured a glass of brandy over her head.
His 1980 marriage to Vanessa, niece of the Duke of Norfolk, produced two daughters whom he adores, but divorce came seven years later and did little to curtail his wandering eye.
The gossip columnists nicknamed him 'Dirty Dai' and 'The Seducer of the Valleys', names which endure to this day, even if his frame is considerably larger than the one which spent all those years dodging the horsewhips of outraged husbands and fathers.
"If you seek publicity, which I do, then you can't complain when it goes against you," he says. "I was rather cross when that EastEnders chap was christened Dirty Den. It was my nickname."
He loves jokes but he is taking this electoral seduction very seriously.
"I can't bear mornings," he admits as he thrusts UKIP leaflets at commuters outside Cardiff Central railway station. He is the only candidate on show at 7.30am, though. He spots a blonde woman handing out leaflets and makes a beeline to see if she is opposition.
"Hello, we're UKIP," he cries.
The lady explains that she's with the Jehovah's Witnesses.
"Jolly good. We're the same sort of thing!" he says cheerily.
The suit is crumpled and an unsightly piece of loo paper is covering a dawn shaving disaster which has stained his shirt.
But Sir Dai is in his element.
"I wouldn't vote for you - ever!" rasps a furious-looking giant of a man with mad white hair, a beard and a donkey jacket.
"Smashing!" replies Sir Dai, delighted to have evoked such passion.
"Don't you love that?" he says as the man walks off.
"Actually, I'd be rather worried if that chap did vote for me."
His pledges in this election are to pull Britain out of the European Union and to make himself redundant. UKIP wants to scrap the £35 million-a-year Welsh Assembly and replace it with a committee of the MPs who are already being paid to represent Wales.
Sir Dai thrusts a leaflet into the hands of a young woman who tosses it aside, shouting: "But I work for the Welsh Assembly!" Sir Dai roars with laughter.
"Good for you!" he cries.
Several people recognise him from the papers and say 'hello'.
A woman stops to tell him how she was a big fan of his late father, Sir Harry Llewellyn, the gold-winning Olympic showjumper.
He has supporters, too.
"I'm right behind you," says a man called Andy Moss. "I used to vote Labour but now it's UKIP."
Unfortunately for Sir Dai, Andy wants to emigrate to Australia. Even so, the candidate is delighted.
"See? If I'm going to do damage, it will be against the socialists," he says.
But why is he bothering? Just four years ago, he announced that he was leaving Wales following arson attacks on some cottages which he owned, and would only return in a coffin. And he hasn't cast a vote since 1970. So, what has happened?
"First, I'm a lot Welsher than I sound," he says. "I was never going to leave. It was just a fit of pique after these chippy yobs tried to burn me out."
The Llewellyns are not ancient Welsh toffs. His grandfather made a mint in coal and bought the baronetcy in one of the former Prime Minister Lloyd George's notorious sale of honours.
"Better to have paid for a title than never to have one at all," says Sir Dai proudly.
"My mother's family were much grander."
His father sold the family seat years ago and Sir Dai now owns a "small house and a small piece of enclosed land' near Abertillery.
"I know it sounds nauseating," he says, emphasising the point by putting his fingers down his throat, "but I like to stay in touch with my Welshness."
The rest of the time, he lives in a rented flat in London.
"I'm as poor as a church mouse but I've had a trillionaire's life."
His last vote was for the Conservatives in 1970.
"I was utterly betrayed because Edward Heath then sold us to Europe, and what has been the point of voting since, when we don't govern ourselves?"
In the Seventies, he produced a pop record urging Britain to pull out of the Common Market.
"My instincts have always been Conservative and everyone has always said 'don't split the Conservative vote' so I haven't done - until now. But, frankly, who cares? Cameron is the same as the rest."
No Etonian loyalties then?
"I've never met him."
Sir Dai launches into a long rant about "faceless Brussels bureaucrats".
He insists he has read the Treaty of Rome and the Treaty of the European Union, and that the final straw was the Government's Sexual Orientation Regulations, pushed through Parliament without proper debate.
"Why should Christians be prosecuted for not wanting their children adopted by gays?"
A month ago, he was talking in a similar vein at a dinner where the guests included the UKIP leader, Nigel Farage. The two men hit it off and Sir Dai was persuaded to join the party. Days later, he was asked to speak at the party's spring conference.
"They gave me a standing ovation."
And here he is in a UKIP rosette fighting for the same seat which his uncle held as a Tory MP during the Fifties. After a morning of comic canvassing, the UKIP machine halts at a pub.
"I need a spot of vod to rejuvenate me," he announces, ordering a vodka and orange.
This campaign is a spin doctor's nightmare. Neither Sir Dai nor his UKIP supporters can name the sitting Assembly Member. They don't even have a map of the constituency.
How will Sir Dai live up to UKIP's pledge to slash council tax by 40per cent? He looks down gravely. 'With, er, a great deal of thought,' he replies utterly unconvincingly.
But later on, the campaign trail leads to a Baptist church hall where all the candidates have their first public debate. They are not an inspiring bunch.
As far as I can work out, Sir Dai is the only one who is not paid for by the taxpayer. The Tory candidate, Jonathan Morgan, a regional Assembly Member (as opposed to a constituency one), is the slickest - articulate, local and full of facts.
The Labour candidate, Sophie Howe, a legal services manager for the Equal Opportunities Commission, bleats the party line about improvements under Labour.
Why, she is asked, have hospital waiting times got longer? 'Because we have been focussing on well-being rather than illness,' she says. Yes, that is what she says.
The Liberal, Ed Bridges, is doing a PhD on public library provision, and the Plaid Cymru ("Party of Wales") candidate, Wyn Jones, hasn't turned up but is represented by a woman who calls herself a political theory researcher.
The Old Etonian party animal no longer seems quite so detached from the real world after all. In fact, he must be the only net contributor to the public purse.
Sir Dai turns out to be the best speaker by far, even if his theatrical rant about 'mealy-mouthed socialist claptrap' and 'faceless bureaucrats' is pretty light on facts.
Asked a question about the Kate/William saga, he replies: 'She's quite a looker so she won't have a tough time.' Hastily, he remembers that he is a politician now: 'Sorry, that's a bit lookist. But she's a lovely girl.'
He gets one of the loudest cheers of the night as he promises to 'give you back your kingdom' and demands: 'We should have a voice!'
What happens if he is actually elected to the Assembly? 'Well, I'll be here until we've scrapped it,' he says. 'But I'm certainly not missing the Monaco Grand Prix.'
dailymail.co.uk
