Do we like them?Do we like Rhun ap Iorwerth?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful or nasty turned up and he backs trans youth healthcare, but we couldn't open full articles, so the picture is incomplete.
Rhun ap Iorwerth is the man who ended Labour's long grip on Wales. After the May 2026 Senedd election Plaid Cymru was the biggest party with 43 of 96 seats, short of a majority, and the Senedd backed him as First Minister on 12 May.
On the scandal front there's nothing to tell. Searches for court cases, lawsuits and allegations came up empty for him. The only conflict was a political stoush in the chamber, where he accused another leader of something at a Covid inquiry. Fair warning: our page fetches were blocked, so this is search results only, not a deep dive.
On the harm test he lands on the right side for this page. In June 2024 PinkNews reported that he backed access to gender-affirming healthcare for trans youth, saying Wales can't go backwards on it. Women's-rights campaigners who want strict single-sex spaces have pushed him on his party's gender policy, and Nation.Cymru reported he was criticised in April 2026 for struggling to defend the party's manifesto position on gender recognition on live TV. Where you land on that depends on whether you read it as a fumbled interview or a policy problem.
His big political project is independence for Wales. In 2024 he told ITV he sees it as the direct opposite of Brexit, and in March 2026 he declared that the old union was finished. Whether that thrills or worries you is a matter of taste, but it's an argument about constitutions, not about hurting anyone.
Now he runs a minority government, so he'll need deals to get anything done. That's where his record will really get tested. His stated policy lines are fair, but we didn't open a voting record or any fact-checks, so we won't pretend to know how his votes line up with his speeches.
The good stuff is harder to pin down from what we could read. We can't point to a charity drive or a personal sacrifice with a proper source, so the case for him rests on his public stance on trans youth healthcare. That counts for something, but it's thin.