Reform’s shambolic Kent experiment

When Reform swept to power in the May local elections, it billed itself as the antidote to complacent politics. The pledge was clear: cut waste, balance the books, tell hard truths. It was the party’s first serious taste of power anywhere in Britain, which it had won promising “common sense”, with a commitment to “doing more with less”. Five months later, those slogans have collided with reality.

The initial victory in Kent was a stunning success. Reform won 57 of the council’s 81 seats, toppling decades of Conservative control. Kemkaran, a former BBC journalist, promised that her new administration would bring “efficiency” and “common sense” to County Hall. But the machinery of local government – budget timetables, statutory duties, risk registers – proved a far harder opponent than the outgoing Tories.

Hardly any of the newly-elected Reform councillors had experience of local government. Among their ranks are decorators, landlords, gas engineers, teachers, a carpet-store owner, a photographer and a paramedic. A surprising number list no other source of income at all – they are not retirees but people of working age. They found themselves overseeing a council budget of £2.6bn. 

One officer described a confused start. Meetings were cancelled. There was little communication. The administration had to begin by learning what a council actually does. The officer said early briefings were “poorly handled” and that the first two months were dominated by uncertainty about who was in charge of what.

In place of steady leadership came theatre. The new administration announced an Elon Musk-inspired Department of Local Government Efficiency, or DOLGE, to scour the council’s books for wasteful spending. It promptly scrapped the council’s 2019 climate-emergency declaration, a symbolic act that consumed hours of council time and ended up with protestors chanting outside County Hall. During the climate debate, Reform councillors warned about the sinister idea of “15-minute cities” and other supposed threats, a nod to conspiracy theories that have gained traction on the party’s fringes. Earlier in the same meeting, Kemkaran’s leader’s report had cited “civil unrest” over migration, setting the tone for what was to follow.

Chair Cllr Palmer opened the meeting by chastising members for their behaviour at the July session, complaining that councillors had stormed out, slammed doors and used “foul and abusive language”. The call for civility lasted only minutes. Kemkaran accused a Green councillor of turning up to a meeting she called about violence against women and girls with “six-foot men pretending to be women”. Seconds later, she suggested a colleague’s scarf made him “a supporter of Hamas”. It was the kind of afternoon Kent hadn’t seen before.

The problems really started when Reform’s campaign promises met the reality of council paperwork. Reform had campaigned on cutting what it called “wasteful spending” while protecting frontline services. Its first attention-grabbing decision was a £50m debt repayment, said to save £670,000 a year in interest. But as the opposition leader Antony Hook of the Liberal Democrats later pointed out, the idea had come directly from Barclays Bank, not DOLGE. 

When the Financial Times reported that Kent was likely to raise council tax next year by the maximum of 5% because Reform’s savings drive had failed, Kemkaran dismissed it as “banter” overheard by a journalist. Yet her own cabinet colleague, Diane Morton, admitted services were already “down to the bare bones.”

Behind the scenes, officers warned that the budget process was weeks behind schedule. “There’s been too much focus on flag-waving for policies that don’t impact the budget,” said one officer.

Even the decision to stay in the crumbling Sessions House headquarters, the council’s historic base in Maidstone, became a symbol of the new administration’s approach. The previous Conservative leadership had planned to sell the ageing building and move staff into cheaper, modern offices nearby, citing rising maintenance costs. Reform reversed that plan within weeks of taking office, saying it would save money in the short term. Opposition councillors warned that millions would still be needed to keep the Victorian complex safe and functional, so the saving was largely cosmetic. Inside County Hall, many saw the move as a gesture rather than a serious attempt to deal with the council’s long-term property costs.

Then came the rows over behaviour. In October, cabinet member David Wimble called a resident a “fuckwit” under an official council Facebook post about debt reduction. The message stayed up for days. No apology followed. Wimble himself is a veteran of shifting political allegiances, having moved from independent to Conservative to Reform. He also publishes The Looker, a Romney Marsh community paper unusually sympathetic to the party he now represents.

Five Reform councillors were later photographed smiling beside a man draped in a neo-Nazi flag at an anti-immigration protest. There was no comment given on that either. Another was found to have posted anti-Muslim memes and praise for Tommy Robinson on social media. There was no statement given. When a journalist covering a far-right protest in Canterbury was taunted with a bag of what organisers claimed was used toilet paper, two senior Reform councillors liked the footage online.

The leadership’s silence hardened the perception of a group unable, or unwilling, to police its own. Kemkaran issued no public rebuke for any of this behaviour. Nigel Farage, whose political showmanship carried the movement into Kent, said nothing either. Despite owning three homes in the county, Farage has stayed out of local politics since the election, surfacing only in a brief summer appearance at County Hall before retreating to the national stage.

By autumn, the Reform administration’s grip was visibly slipping. The leaked video of Kemkaran telling colleagues to “suck it up” tore open weeks of private resentment. Councillor Paul Thomas tried to ask whether backbenchers were being asked to support the leadership without knowing what they were being told to back. “I’m on holiday this week, Paul,” Kemkaran replied, sounding irritated, before warning him she would mute him if he continued. As she spoke, deputy leader Brian Collins could be seen laughing. “It’s all right Brian, you keep laughing your head off, mate,” Thomas shot back as he was muted.

Another councillor, Dean Burns, stepped in: “Let’s face it,” he said, “the situation at the moment with regards to our group is not great.” He described “a lot of backbiting going on”, which he said “tends to be coming from the top down,” adding that he had “worked my arse off in my own portfolio” but still felt like he was “getting a rod up my backside all the time.”

The fallout was immediate. Within 48 hours, four councillors – Paul Thomas, Oliver Bradshaw, Bill Barrett and Maxine Fothergill – were suspended following the video leak. Robert Ford, who was already suspended pending a misconduct investigation, was expelled a few days later alongside Barrett. Now, three more – Brian Black, Thomas and Bradshaw – have also gone, accused by Reform headquarters of showing “a pattern of dishonest and deceptive behaviour.”

Suggested Reading

More triumphs for Reform, from Cornwall to Kent

Rats in a Sack

Barrett told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that the leadership had become “toxic”. He made allegations about bullying and claimed that eight formal complaints had been lodged against Kemkaran and her deputies. “The reality is KCC at the moment is run by three incompetent individuals,” he said. Reform’s headquarters denied that any evidence of bullying had been found.

The numbers tell their own story. In five months, the group had lost or suspended eight councillors. A 57 seat group had slipped to 49. The administration still controlled the chamber, but its authority was starting to look fragile.

Officials describe an atmosphere of frustration rather than fear. “The mood had settled slightly until the latest stories,” one said. “Now there’s almost gallows humour, wondering which one will go next.” The council’s outgoing chief executive, Amanda Beer, has held repeated meetings to reassure staff, something she “never would have had to do under a previous administration.”

Outside County Hall, on Maidstone High Street, people hurry past the buskers while a shopkeeper argues with a customer over a mobile-phone repair. After an hour of asking shoppers what they make of their new council administration, almost nobody wants to answer. Some shrug, saying they’re “not into politics.” Others wave a hand and keep walking. There is no great sense of betrayal, only the quiet indifference of people who expected nothing and got it.

Opposition parties, marginal by numbers, have become spectators. But their leaders describe a system creaking under the strain. Green leader Mark Hood said the atmosphere in the chamber has become “toxic,” and that the transition “could not have gone much worse,” with meetings cancelled for weeks after the election and some council committees still not restarted.

He said the administration appeared “entirely reactive,” continuing Conservative-era outsourcing and “renewing contracts rather than bringing services in-house to control cost.” The leader, he added, “seems incapable of collaboration or seeking consensus as she prefers to use conflict and culture-war issues to attract headlines,” warning that this approach “is not conducive to building a meaningful partnership style of leadership.”

Most of the council, Hood said, now runs itself. “What really worries us is the administration’s inexperience and their ignorance of the unintended consequences of the cuts they will need to make which could cost more in the long run.” He added: “some of those who voted Reform have buyers’ regret now they are seeing the impact and chaos.”

The unrest has already damaged Kent’s relations with other authorities. The Labour leader of Medway Council, Kent’s only other upper-tier authority, Vince Maple, publicly accused Kemkaran of acting in bad faith over local-government reorganisation and described her remarks about “a shocking level of ignorance” among other leaders as “pretty disrespectful”. A proposed joint funding deal to save the county’s tourism and investment agencies fell apart soon after.

By late October, Reform’s own councillors were filing complaints to London headquarters about “a culture and a leadership style” that left backbenchers sidelined. A statement of support for Kemkaran soon circulated and was signed by 37 of the group’s remaining councillors. For a party that campaigned on transparency and discipline, the response was striking.

Not every Reform member at County Hall has lost focus. Some, like cabinet member for adult social care Diane Morton, have earned respect for their candour and work ethic. “She really seems to have a passion for her brief,” the officer said. “She’s been honest about the pressures the council faces.” 

But that honesty only highlights the central problem: arithmetic. More than half of Kent’s budget is locked into adult social care, children’s services and special-needs education, areas that cannot legally be cut. That has led directly to the question of tax. Every one percentage point rise in council tax raises about £10m, and every council in England faces the same trap: raise to the limit and stand still, or refuse and face insolvency.

That, ultimately, is what Reform UK has discovered. Governing is not about opinions but about maths. The party promised to make government leaner and freer, but having got into power, Reform’s ideology is useless when it comes to the budgetary arithmetic of social care combined with the weight of public expectation.

For most residents, dysfunction doesn’t look like shouting at meetings. It looks like longer waits for social care assessments, special needs support plans stuck in limbo, and roads left to crumble. Kent’s multi-billion pound budget touches almost every household, from school meals to foster placements, and when leadership turns inward, those services start to fray. Officers can absorb the shock for a while, but the warning signs are familiar: missed budget deadlines, departments competing for dwindling funds, morale ebbing away. When that happens, trust in local government itself starts to erode, and it becomes increasingly hard to do the quiet work that holds a county together.

Suggested Reading

Yet more Reform councillors jump ship in Cornwall

Rats in a Sack

That might be the real lesson of Kent. The danger isn’t only that populists struggle to govern, but that their failures drain the institutions beneath them. When politics turns inward, services don’t stop overnight, they simply wear down, until the damage becomes too deep to mend.

Five months in, the Kent experiment looks less like a showcase than a mirror. It reflects every pressure that local government faces, amplified by inexperience and infighting. It shows what happens when a protest movement inherits an institution built for process, and finds itself swallowed by it.

What began with declarations of discipline and common sense has drifted into suspension notices and private complaints. The machinery of the council keeps moving, indifferent to who sits at the top. Reform is still in charge, at least on paper, but much of its authority now exists only in theory. If this is Reform’s model for government, Kent may have provided Britain with a warning.