The right-wing British Democrat Party has achieved its first ever electoral success in the country - at the slightly unexpected location of a Kent village.

Lawrence Rustem has been elected as a Detling parish councillor in the village near Maidstone after standing on the British Democrats ticket, despite nobody actually voting for him.

Mr Rustem was one of three people elected unopposed to the council after it was thrown into turmoil last July with the mass resignation of six of its seven councillors.

The British Democrat Party was formed in Leicestershire in 2013 by former members of the British National Party, the Democratic Nationalists, the Freedom Party, and the UK Independence Party.

Mr Rustem was himself a member of the British National Party for 20 years, before joining briefly the For Britain Movement, and then the British Democrats.

The civil enforcement officer is no stranger to council work or elections. Originally a Londoner, though he now lives in Shepway in Maidstone, he was elected to the Valence Ward of Barking and Dagenham Council in 2006, serving for four years until 2010.

He stood for the British Democrats at the last Maidstone council elections, in the Shepway South ward, securing 13.7% of the votes, one of the party's biggest results to date.

Mr Rustem who said he had "been political since I was a little boy" is half Turkish Cypriot.

He was sometimes called Temucin Rustem by his Turkish patriot father, but usually always goes by Lawrence.

His father arrived in Britain in 1957 as an economic migrant.

If Mr Rustem was expecting to face some controversy when he attended his first Detling Parish Council meeting on Tuesday night, he was right.

But the controversy was not over his political affiliations, which were never once mentioned either by himself or by the very vocal crowd of 30 members of the public packed into the small meeting room at Detling Village Hall.

There is controversy in the village on several issues – from whether someone should be allowed to place a bouncy castle on the village field, to why the church magazine stopped taking bulletins from the parish council, whether the minutes of the last council meeting were accurate, to who ripped down election notices from the parish notice boards.

But the issue that caused the resignations last July remains as contentious as any.

The parish council was landed with a £31,000 bill after a former parish clerk, Sherrie Babbington, who had served the council for 23 years, took it to an industrial tribunal alleging constructive dismissal.

One of the six councillors who subsequently left, Richard Finn, is understood to have resigned for personal reasons.

Five others, including the former chairman, Irene Bowie, resigned, they said, because of the conduct of the sole remaining councillor, Chris Evernden, and because of harassment from some villagers.

Mrs Bowie had earlier explained: "The clerk's legal action was against the council, but in fact in all the pages of the evidence she produced there was only one person referred to - Cllr Evernden.

She said: "When we saw the weight of evidence, we felt there was just no way to defend the council against the action."

Detling reached an out-of-court settlement with Mrs Babbington to pay her £30,000 compensation and £1,000 legal fees.

Mrs Bowie said: "If we hadn't settled, I fear the tribunal might have awarded a much larger sum."

The former councillor said she and her colleagues had hoped that Cllr Evernden would "do the decent thing" and resign, but he had declined to do so.

So instead, they resigned en masse.

But she added: "There had also been a co-ordinated campaign against the council with a string of FOI requests and vexatious complaints that have just left the council paralysed. Things just became incredibly difficult."

Cllr Evernden responded to the accusations with a different view.

He said: "The former clerk did make a complaint about me to the monitoring officer at MBC a couple of years ago. It was found to be groundless.

"The parish council was wrong not to fight the constructive dismissal case. There was no evidence. We would have won."

Cllr Evernden questioned the explanation given for the resignations. He said: "Why did they not resign when the clerk first announced her resignation in September last? Instead they waited till after the annual parish meeting where one resident after another complained about the performance of the council."

Cllr Evernden said problems with the parish council went back years but things had come to a head in July over different approaches to a five-acre open space which the council has owned since 2010 known as Monk's Meadow.

It is named after an elderly resident, John Monk, who had cared for the area for many years.

The parish council then took the decision to ask Mr Monk to stop his efforts, engaging the Medway Valley Countryside Partnership to look after the meadow instead and to go for a more natural, re-wilded look.

The decision did not go down well in several quarters.

Mrs Bowie said the decision had been taken partly because of the need to provide insurance – Mr Monk was now in his 80s.

The question of the compensation payment and of the field were both issues raised at the meeting on Tuesday, but the new council chairman, Cllr Geoff Cosgrove, had no answers on any of the issues.

He explained that until 7pm that evening, when they had signed their acceptance forms in front of the clerk, neither he nor the other two new councillors - Cllr Rustem and Cllr Karl Pay - were officially councillors and so had been able to conduct any business.

Indeed he said that he and Cllr Rustem and Cllr Pay were meeting for the first time that night.

Fortunately Cllr Cosgrove, a civil engineer, who has spent some time living abroad though he has owned a house in the village since 1991, has some experience of council matters.

It is his third time on the council. He was chairman between 2001 and 2012, and returned as a councillor for a single year in 2017.

He is also a parish councillor for Kingsnorth, near Ashford.

Cllr Pay, who has lived in the village for over seven years, is the managing director of Rusthall Lodge Housing Association. With no previous council experience, he said: "I felt we just needed to come together to try to improve this beautiful village we live in."

Cllr Rustem told the meeting that he had chosen to stand for Detling simply because he had seen an opportunity.

He said: "I saw there were six vacancies, and guessed that gave me a good chance of getting in! When it comes to Detling, I'm as green as they come - but I won't be for long!"

The parish also has a newly appointed clerk, Wendy Licence, though she is not new to clerking. She is also the clerk at three parishes in Sittingbourne.

Cllr Cosgrove made repeated calls to the public present to give the new councillors time to put their feet under the table and also to let the past lie.

He said: "It's time for a fresh start; let's look to the future."

Mr Rustem said after the meeting: "It was very different from what I expected. I'm afraid at the moment I really don't understand why everyone's so upset."

There will be a second round of elections in November to fill the three vacancies that are still outstanding.