Meet the teenage punk turned teacher who just became Reform’s top woman

Standing in the Cardiff sunshine this Monday, Nigel Farage unveiled the leader of Reform UK in Wales – a former English teacher and former teenage punk named Helen Jenner. Jenner is just six months into public office, and takes on the role at a tumultuous time for her party, with a police investigation into Reform over donations still ongoing. Last week, former Welsh leader Dan Thomas stood down following his arrest on suspicion of controlling or coercive behaviour and assault. Thomas was released on bail, denies any wrongdoing and has said he had been “released without charge”. He remains a Reform Party member. Jenner put herself forward to replace him, and her fellow Senedd members voted very narrowly, 17-15, for her to win over Jason O’Connell. Shorts Farage describes Jenner as a “determined campaigner” and “someone I trust”. Who is she, what are her politics and what’s she going to do now she’s in power? Born in Neath in 1988, Jenner moved aged two to Anglesey, where she learned Welsh at school, before reading English Literature at Bangor University. Here, she dyed her hair pink and joined a “very punk, rocky type” band called Mephistophelean Engines of Pleasure, or Mephs for short. She completed her teacher training at Bangor, and, after some placements in the north west of England, moved to London to teach English at the BRIT School, the performing arts college that produced alumni Raye, Adele and Amy Winehouse. This week, she joked on the BBC Today show that: “Standing up in that chamber is not half as scary as year 11 last lesson on a Friday!” Jenner joined UKIP in her mid-twenties after her father, who was “banging on about the European Union constantly”, joined the party, she recently told the BBC’s Walescast. She was wooed by watching YouTube clips of Farage speaking at the European Parliament: “I’ve never seen anybody so animated, I felt he was really principled and I suddenly thought ‘oh, I actually care about politics now’.” It was while active in UKIP’s youth wing that she met (and, in 2016, married) Emmett Jenner. The couple have two children, a boy and a girl, aged nine and seven. By 2015, the now-Mrs Jenner began meeting “figures from the upper echelons of the party” such as Farage, “which seemed very surreal to me after having watched him on YouTube for years”, she would write years later on the UKIP-affiliated blog, Kippercentral. Other blogs from that time reveal her views on issues such as abortion. When Ireland voted in its 2018 referendum to legalise abortion, she wrote: “I find it beyond repulsive that people, mainly women, were rejoicing, crying tears of happiness and hugging” and in another post “never forget that abortion is always a tragedy, not something to celebrate”. All Kippercentral blogs have now been deleted. Jenner has not publicly commented on abortion since. Nigel Farage said in 2025 that Reform considers abortion “a matter of personal conscience” for its individual politicians and candidates. When contacted this week, a Reform Wales spokesperson told the I Paper: “Helen believes in a woman’s right to choose.” In another Kipperland blog post in 2017, she asserted that during the 2016 EU referendum campaign, “the establishment pulled [the race] card out of the pack, shook it, blew the dust off it and played it at every possible juncture”. Like Farage, she has also spoken of bringing back grammar schools, because some less academic pupils who experience “problems with concentration, hard home lives or are just completely uninterested and under-stimulated” will “make the lives of teachers and their fellow classmates…hell”. Jenner has only held political office since May this year but she is evidently trusted by Farage (Photo: Matthew Horwood/Getty) Jenner returned to Wales and, in 2019, made an unsuccessful bid to become a Brexit Party MP for Ynys Môn. That same year, Mr Jenner unsuccessfully ran to become a UKIP MP in Bromley and Chislehurst; in 2021, he failed to become a Senedd Member for Ynys Môn, before making another unsuccessful bid in 2024 to be the area’s Reform MP. Two years later, Mrs Jenner quit her job as a teacher and ran again, this time successfully, becoming Reform’s Senedd member for Bangor Conwy Môn. During TV hustings for the campaign, she defended Farage calling Welsh speakers “foreign speakers” by saying the remark was “not a joke I would have made, but it was a joke”. She impressed voters – in that year’s election, Reform took 34 seats in the Senedd to Plaid Cymru’s 43. Reform are now the official opposition to the Plaid Cymru minority government. But the Welsh Reform party, Farage has acknowledged, has had “one or two bumps in the road” – Jenner faces a difficult task to unify it. Last year, the previous leader, Nathan Gill, was imprisoned for ten years after being found guilty of taking bribes from Russia while he was an MEP. And last week, there were “two disasters”, according to Jenner; on the same day Thomas stood down, Senedd member Sarah Cooper-Lesadd defected to Plaid, saying Reform has “no interest in Wales”. Reform claimed it was going to eject her anyway, as she was “in favour of Welsh independence”. Jenner’s predecessor “did a relatively good job in holding together the very disparate group of individuals who were elected as Reform,” says Laura McAllister, a professor of law and politics at Cardiff University. Many of the party’s new MSs “are new to politics altogether” and “very few of them have been in a professional political environment before. So Helen Jenner will have a tough task,” she says. Winning the leadership with just a two-person majority “suggests some in the group do not wish to see Helen Jenner as leader…and there are rumours of discord within the group”. Jenner has already used her first First Minister’s questions to challenge Senedd leader Rhun ap Iorwerth on grooming gangs, calling for a grooming gang inquiry in the devolved nation. When probed on the BBC on donations from foreign billionaires, she responded: “There’s a lot of people, whether they’re wealthy people, not so wealthy people, that believe in the cause and believe in the party, and want to see us succeed, and as I said, that is not my concern”. While she’s only held political office since May this year, she is evidently trusted by Farage. “She’s clearly very strongly in his camp”, Professor McAllister says. What will her priorities be? “The last thing he needs is controversy or bad behaviour in the devolved Senedd – so I believe that discipline will be a priority.”