A Mexican-style stand-off over devolution in Kent?
The Reform Party formally takes control of the county council after its historic win.
When the Reform party stormed to victory in the local county council election earlier this month, it did so with a promise that things would be different.
Well, the grand day when this promise could start to be put into practice came and went this week and if it was pretty much the same as before, there were some intriguing nuggets amid the formal ceremonial nuts and bolts.
The authority’s annual meeting is where the civic requirements of installing a new administration are played out. It may lack the pomp and circumstance that accompanies events in Parliament, but no-one was complaining.
There was the now customary display of turquoise ties, shirts and jackets - adopted by the Reform party in the campaign - in the council chamber
Why Reform appropriated a colour for their campaign banners, posters and election material that was once popular in the 1970s and found its way into many a suburban bathroom, we are not sure.
And quite what the Reform Party would have done had the Ukrainian flag - due to be taken down from the chamber - been of the same hue.
Anyway, the key focus of the meeting was to elect a new county council leader, although it was more of a coronation than a ballot.
With 57 of the authority’s seats held by the party, there was no danger at all that the leader-elect Linden Kemkaran, would not get the support she needed to become successor to the ex-Conservative leader Roger Gough.
Cllr Kemkaran was nominated by Cllr Maxwell Harrison, who plundered the Thesaurus for a tub-thumping peroration in which he declared it was very clear that “something remarkable” was happening and there had been a “total rejection” of the two-party system.
He lavished praise on the leader, saying she had fortitude, tenacity and bravery, political virtues that should be helpful over the next four years.
Winding up his speech, he confidently predicted it wouldn’t be long before the Reform Party took charge not just of Kent but the whole country, with a certain Mr Farage installed in Downing Street.
A more conciliatory tone might have been wiser, but you got the sense that Cllr Harrison doesn’t do modesty and after all, it was the party’s day in the sun.
Accepting the nomination, the new leader gave an assured, confident and voter-friendly speech with a neat announcement that the new administration would take a 5% cut in their allowances.
“I’d like to thank my fellow Members for putting their trust in me to lead all of us forward in what can only be described as rather uncertain waters,” she said.
But her key focus was on what she described as the spectre of local government reorganisation that was “hurtling down the track at alarming speed.”
“I am not sure that it is the best for Kent…by splitting up Kent, we could be losing that sense of ‘one county, one people. I also fear that unitaries take away power from individuals.”
So, might we see a stand-off between KCC and the government over the issue of devolution and a carve-up of the county into a clutch of new unitaries? You got the distinct impression that was possible, but we won’t know until the Autumn, when the government wants to hear what councils have to offer.