𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Linden Kemkaran is on the frontline of the campaign to make Nigel Farage prime minister and she is more than up for the fight. The mother of two has a black belt in taekwondo and her eyes light up as she describes the “immense” satisfaction of landing a well-aimed blow to the head or solar plexus of an opponent.

“I shouldn’t enjoy it so much but I just do,” she admits.

Rival parties were left reeling last year when Reform UK won control of Kent County Council, which serves more than 1.6 million people. As the council leader she continues to take inspiration from her martial art.

“Sparring is really about defending yourself from what your opponent throws at you and then working out where to get your attack in quickly before they realise what you’re about to do,” she says.

Few council leaders are household names in their own county, never mind across the country. But the Reform group has been under intense scrutiny since it arrived in the council chamber.

Ms Kemkaran, 56, wears what on first glance looks like a delicate bracelet. But on close inspection the beads spell out: “Suck it up.” This is the blunt advice she dished out as leader during an early and tempestuous internal meeting. The video recording was leaked and has now been watched more than 390,000 times. While she admits she “probably” should have handled the situation differently, she believes it sent out the message she would not tolerate “nonsense”.

“You can’t run a council if you’re going to be all flippy and floppy and try and keep everybody happy,” she says. “It’s not going to work.”

Reform hopes to win control of more councils in May’s looming elections. This is a chance for the party to show it can be trusted with power. The Reform revolution is far from finished, she insists.

“We’ve got a full tank of gas and we’ve got jerry cans in the boot as well.”

She is working each day to ensure Mr Farage arrives in Downing Street as prime minister at the next election, and she predicts this will rank alongside Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979 and Tony Blair’s in 1997 as a turning point for the country. An “electric feeling” went through her when Mr Farage announced his return to politics just weeks ahead of the July 2024 election.

“I just knew something was about to change and change big, and I wanted to be part of it.”

Winning in Kent, the “garden of England” was a landmark moment for Reform. It showed the party could triumph far beyond the Red Wall – and she is in no doubt why the candidates struck such a chord with voters.

“We talked the same language as the people whose doors we were knocking on.”

The citizens and would-be councillors shared a dismay, she claims, at the “uncontrolled immigration that’s been allowed to change this country fundamentally over the last 20-odd years”. Since taking power, the Channel-facing council has declared an illegal migration “emergency”.

This has nothing to do with xenophobia, she argues, pointing to her family history. Her father came from to England from Trinidad and met her mother while they trained as teachers. Dartford-born Ms Kemkaran says she knows “what proper racism looks like” from the days when her mother was “spat at in the street for having mixed-race children”.

She states: “I am the product of controlled, legal immigration from a wave of immigrants who were invited here; who came here legally; who worked for every penny; who didn’t depend on the state for a damn thing, and they integrated.”

She recalls her parents’ struggles with the cost of living when the cost of heating oil surged. They did not have “two beans to rub together”

“I remember my mum would go for days without eating properly. She would eat our leftovers… That’s that’s how poor we were at that time.”

A passion for the role of the family in society shapes her politics today. Family, she says, is the “bedrock of everything”, adding that “for too long the traditional family unit has been not just ignored – I think it’s almost been systematically dismantled by successive governments, and we’re now seeing the end result of that.”

She continues: “The stats do not lie. Children flourish when they’ve got two parents who are married to each other who stay together and bring up those children together in a stable settled household.”

After leaving school she worked in retail, including a stint at Argos, before winning a civil service post at the Ministry of Defence. She bought a “big 500cc motorbike” to do the commute – a decision which led to a cataclysm in her young life.

She remembers: “Everybody said, ‘Oh you’ll kill yourself.’ And I was like, ‘No, I’ll be fine.’ What happened? I crashed it on the way home one night, nearly killed myself.”

She was “stuck in hospital for weeks and weeks” and “very nearly” lost a leg. Months of “heavy-duty military rehabilitation” followed and she thought hard about what she wanted to do in life.

A squadron leader advised her to get a degree and she enrolled at the University of Surrey to study English, Drama and Theatre. Before long she was working on a BBC newsdesk and putting her background at the MoD to good use, producing defence and security-related stories in the global tumult following the September 11 attacks.

Today, she wants to see Britain rearmed but doubts that Labour will switch spending from welfare to defence.

“We are wasting money paying people to sit on their backsides at home instead of going out and working,” she claims. “But look what happened when Labour tried to make a few tweaks – and they were tweaks – to the benefit system.

“There was a massive rebellion.”

She is also alarmed by the impact of diversity, equity and inclusion policies in the military.

“My son is in the army and he passed out of his training at the end of last year,” she says. “And watching him go through his his course, which was, you know, one of the toughest in the world, I just thought, ‘How dare you cripple our armed forces with this nonsense?’”

She remains appalled at the impact of the Covid-era lockdowns, especially on children. Together with her friend Anna Firth – who would go on to become a Conservative MP and employ Ms Kemkaran – she launched an online summer school to help pupils make up for lost time in the classroom.

Looking back on the lockdown era, she says: “I remember meeting somebody on my daily prescribed walk and and we were worried that somebody might spot us talking in the park. We were mad, weren’t we?”

Lockdowns did not save the life of her mother, who died of Covid. Government decisions at this time, she believes, led to a “massive disconnect” between “the people in Number 10 and the rest of the country”.

Now she believes Reform has the chance to reverse Britain’s sense of national decline.

“It’s going to take Herculean efforts to do it, but, yes, it can be done,” she insists. “It absolutely can.”

Her personal heroes include rock legends Suzi Quatro, Chrissie Hynde, Debbie Harry – and Ms Kemkaran has no inhibitions about turning up the volume on the political stage.

“Now,” she says, “I love a fight, as you’ve probably guessed. I’m probably far too combative for my own good. But I believe I share that [passion] with other members of Reform and that gives me hope… When you’re with a whole bunch of other people who are also up for the fight, anything’s possible.”