Did teenagers have the final say? A by-election in a sleepy Welsh town has become a test of the changing political tide in Wales and across the UK. But could teenage voters tip the balance?
Election defeat ‘humiliation for Labour’
Patient Plaid: Election winner Whittle (above) first joined Plaid Cymru aged 15 in 1968, but has waited until his 70s to get his taste of victory. Glossary
Caerphilly - A town in south Wales with a population of 41,000.
Plaid Cymru - The Welsh nationalist party. Its first MP, Gwynfor Evans, entered parliament in 1966 — the same year as the Aberfan disaster.
Election - A vote in which someone is chosen to represent a group of people.
By-election - An election held outside a general election to replace an MP who has resigned or otherwise left office.
Constituency - An area whose voters elect a person to represent them.
Wales - Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is part of the island of Great Britain.
Reform UK - Officially Reform UK, a political party set up in 2018 as the Brexit Party. Its most prominent figure is Nigel Farage.
NHS - The National Health Service, the publicly funded healthcare system in the UK. The NHS was founded in 1948.
First Past the Post - A voting system in which the winner is simply whoever comes first in each area. As such, the winning party almost never has a majority of the vote, and sometimes might even win a smaller share of the vote than its opponent.
Proportional voting system - Proportional representation covers a number of different voting systems in which the number of seats a party gets links closely to the proportion of the total votes cast they received. Some people think it is fairer than the First Past The Post method, in which the person with the most votes is declared the winner.