Cases of mistaken identity are often quite fun.

I, for example, am regularly mistaken for Brad Pitt, and occasionally a young Robert Redford.

“How did you acquire a time machine, Mr Redford?” people cry, and I am forced to tell them that no, I am just Emile Donovan, podcast host. They are disappointed, but understanding.

(OK, so this has never actually happened, but I can hold out hope).

Other cases of mistaken identity, however, are more nefarious – with a potentially more sinister undertone. Such as in the case of English political journalist Will Hayward, who works for Wales Online.

Hayward tells the story in today’s episode of Newsable – and it all pertains to Wales’s first minister.

“We’ve got devolution in the UK – so Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, (they) have their own powers”, Hayward explains.

“Things like health and education in Wales are run by the Welsh government, which is headed by the First Minister, which is Mark Drakeford.”

In 2020, rumours began to abound in political circles in that Hayward – who is one of the best-known political reporters in Wales – was, in fact, Mark Drakeford’s nephew.

“It was a very contentious time and there was a lot of misinformation going around”, Hayward says.

“It was a weekend, and I got a call from my editor saying, ‘this is quite a weird one, but I need to ask you a question. Are you Mark Drakeford’s nephew?’

“I’m from England, Mark Drakeford is from west Wales. He’s a first language Welsh speaker. We don’t look alike, I like to think, no offence to him.

“I said to my editor, no I’m not related to Mark Drakeford. And he said, ‘oh we’ve just had this woman call up saying that he is your uncle’. My editor went back to her and said no, Mark Drakeford, he’s not Will’s uncle.”

Hayward thought nothing of it – you do encounter some interesting characters as a journalist, after all.

But, about six months later, he was looking through Drakeford’s Wikipedia page. And there, in the ‘personal life’ section, a claim: that Drakeford was the uncle of journalist Will Hayward.

“That was when I kind of started to question my sanity.

“Is he actually my uncle? Is (that) what’s happening?

“So I rang my mum and was like, do you have a brother who you never told me about, who moved to Wales and became a Welsh speaker and then a social policy professor?

“She said no, that’s insane.

“I was like, I know it’s insane!”

In his work, Hayward often debunks myths and misinformation – which he says has made a small but passionate group of people very hostile towards him.

“I think they kind of latched onto this … I just ignored it, but then it got to the point where I was like, well, this is actually getting quite damaging – I’ve got to say something because the fact I hadn’t said anything looked a bit … well, to the people, they thought it was very suspicious.

“So I wrote a piece, basically, about how I’m not related to this man.”

Does Hayward find the saga amusing? Or worrying?

“I think it’s possible for something to be hilarious but also quite damaging.

“It’s not going to affect me particularly negatively – I think most right-thinking people, after a bit, realise that this is rubbish.

“But I think the ability of these things to spread … I like to think that I probably know who I’m related to better than people who don’t know me. And yet, when confronted with this, I was arguing with a guy who didn’t know me, who’d never met me, that I was wrong about who I was related to!

“Every denial is a confirmation. When you are convinced (you’re) the cleverest person in the room and everyone else in your chat room is going ‘yeah, you’re right, you’re onto something here’, it’s quite hard to untangle.

“As a country, we’ve gone down some pretty deep rabbit holes recently. And I think stuff like this is maybe both a symptom and a cause of that.”

Newsable is Stuff’s daily news podcast, wrapping up what’s worth talking about in a short package every weekday morning. You can find new episodes and more detail on our stories here or in our newsletter. Make sure to like and follow us wherever you get your podcasts and across Instagram and TikTok.