This week, local democracy reporter Simon Finlay looks at how Reform won control of Kent County Council, and what challenges it now faces…

The penny dropped for one Kent County Council (KCC) election candidate on May 1 when three young men turned up at a polling station in Mid-Kent and, clearly unaccustomed to such surroundings, asked where they could “vote for Nigel Farage”.

Something was going on and he didn’t know what it was but it didn’t smell good for his party. Most established political parties rely on polling survey data, past voting patterns and canvass returns.

Activists concentrate on the known, core vote and ignore the households where people don’t bother with the polling stations. They’ll attempt to persuade the undecided and shove as many leaflets through doors as time, money and willing hands will allow.

Reform UK, which was starting from a near-zero base, now sits with 57 members at KCC and it all comes down to the unseen congregation who, in some divisions, hoisted the turnout figure up on projections.

The chances are many were not even spoken to by the mainstream parties. While the voting surge in favour of Mr Farage’s team may have been something of a surprise to the chap mentioned earlier, it was not to the Tories.

Two or three days before the polls opened, the Conservative machine had identified through its own survey analysis that perhaps only nine of its 57 seats were ‘safe’ and another 20 were ‘too close to call’. The party ended up with five.

Defeated KCC leader Roger Gough conceded the result to be “apocalyptic” long before lunch at the count the next day.

Why did Reform UK perform so well? Clearly, many Kent residents do not feel the duopoly in charge of successive governments has made much of a fist of it in the past couple of decades. This was not an election on purely local issues.

“The old order, particularly the Conservatives, is praying the Farage team will mess it up at County Hall…”

People are broke yet expected to pay through the nose for things that don't work properly. There’s plenty to choose from - roads, prisons, police, the NHS, greedy water companies, the courts, mental health care, public transport, and social care are a few from a long list.

They're fed up with houses being built everywhere that few, especially the young, can afford to buy or even rent; fed up with endless roadworks and clogged up highways; fed up with being robbed at the petrol pumps and shops.

Ben Walker, noting in the New Statesman that Reform was able to inspire people to vote who were otherwise disengaged, added: “If a general election were held now, the party would overwhelm the House of Commons with 250 parliamentarians. Labour would flounder with 150. The Conservatives would come third with 100.”

Electoral Calculus, whose prediction Reform UK would win outright at the KCC poll few believed, backs that assertion up, with a predicted 245 MPs, Labour 177 and the Tories 94.

Perhaps we are entering that 100-year cycle where British politics fundamentally changes.

The old order, particularly the Conservatives, is praying the Farage team will mess it up at County Hall - short of the necessary skills; prone to squabbling or distracted by other things.

KCC could be tipped into bankruptcy in months with by-elections certain to follow even before that, say others.

And they ask: How many of the 57 victors were paper candidates who unexpectedly won? How many realise the time commitment required of a county councillor? How many knew KCC sits during the day, not in the evenings? How many realise it takes about a year to learn the ropes? How many know how badly it pays for the effort required?

During the election, Reform UK noted that Kent is “broken” and the party, now under the leadership in Kent of Linden Kemkaran, will “fix it”.

There’s plenty to fix but whether Mrs Kemkaran, doughty and no-nonsense as she appears, has the tools for the job will become apparent in the months ahead.

There are plenty of ways to stay in the know when it comes to politics in Kent and Medway.

For more from Simon Finlay and the local democracy team, you can sign up to the Kent Politics Briefing newsletter, which arrives in inboxes every Friday.

You can also listen to our Kent Politics Podcast. This week’s episode welcomes Cllr Mike Baldock, who lost his Swale West seat to ex-UKIP colleague Richard Palmer.

You can listen to the podcast at IM Listening, or download it from Apple Podcasts, Spotify and TuneIn – just search for Kent Politics Podcast. New episodes are available every Friday.

And you can watch the KMTV Kent Politics Show every Friday at 5pm on Freeview channel 7 and Virgin Media channel 159.