The much-memed ‘Jackie Weaver’ parish council meeting incident of 2020 does not warrant recounting, but has become the gold standard when it comes to unruly online political get-togethers.

Kent County Council’s (KCC) Reform UK administration made a respectable bid for membership of this small but vibrant group in the past week, as shown in footage leaked to the Guardian.

In the screen-recorded meeting, leader Cllr Linden Kemkaran tells her members that sometimes she will personally make the “really big decisions”, and that they need to “f****** suck it up”.

One councillor argued that backbenchers are being insufficiently briefed on the leadership’s line on local government reorganisation, and even questioned if they have “the right leader and the right cabinet”.

The rest of the video is similarly ill-tempered, and shows Cllr Kemkaran attempting to exert authority by raising her voice – hard enough to achieve in person, impossible in a glorified teleconference.

Not content with the excitable chatter the video itself has produced about Kent Reform having their knives out, the leadership then removed the whip from four councillors for “bringing the party into disrepute” – with them seemingly charged with conspiring to leak the video.

Leaking information detrimental to your political rivals is at this point a perfectly normal part of politics, whether politicians want to claim that they’re above such things in principle or not.

Getting the boot if you’re found out to have done so should be just as expected.

Reform’s opponents are naturally keen to capitalise on the video, and understandably so – it’s embarrassing for everybody involved.

But contrary to what the other parties will argue, this debacle shows not how uniquely unsuited and unfit for government Reform are, but how conventional they are.

The conduct of this recorded meeting only appears remarkable because other parties, with internal cultures developed over decades, have their own elaborate cant of innuendos, euphemisms, and platitudes which make sense only to each other and express the same sentiments as Cllr Kemkaran and others in this video, just in a way which sounds more diplomatic.

Members of political parties often do not get along.

Any party large enough to have factions has them, and their vitriol is often at least as strong towards each other as towards other parties.

Party politics also selects for difficult and unusual personalities – it is a minority affair, and very few ‘normal people’ could stand either the other people or the process involved in becoming a politician at any level if they wanted to.

Party discipline is an essential part of politics. A party in office is not a collection of individuals elected to all do what they personally believe to be best – it is an organisation elected to deliver on a mandate of concrete policies.

The democratic force of that mandate must supersede the whims of individual politicians, who are generally ambitious and supremely self-regarding.

However, meaningful party discipline can only exist when you have parties actually united on a meaningful mandate.

Reform is able to project a surface-level unity of purpose by virtue of emphasis on immigration – it creates a clear friend-enemy distinction which does actually unite members and supporters.

Beyond this, however, which KCC cannot affect anyway, what actually unifies them beyond culture war talking points and opposition to the major parties?

Perhaps this is enough for a national party to upend an exhausted establishment, but it is not a blueprint for actually administering a local council.

It is no surprise they don’t agree on local government reorganisation and are reduced to shouting at each other when told to simply accept a position on an issue most of them likely never thought about before May.

Politicians often should be told to “f****** suck it up” in the interest of their party and its mandate, but Linden Kemkaran’s outburst derives not from the clarity of their mandate, but from its vagueness.

They were not elected on a platform of some specific model of local government reorganisation, or of many concrete policy gains at all beyond nebulous promises of balancing the books and cutting waste.

Their mandate was scarcely to deliver much beyond throttling the establishment parties at the polls, which they have done very successfully.

Cringe-worthy as it may be, it will take more than the intra-party squabbling of his local scions to stop Nigel Farage doing the same at the next general election.

It will, however, suck up much of the time of politicians who should have better things to be doing.