The leader of Reform UK’s flagship local authority has told her fellow councillors that she launched a hunt for the “cowards” who leaked a recorded meeting in which she said those who disagreed with decisions would have to “fucking suck it up”.
Bitter divisions among Reform members of Kent county council, one of 10 controlled outright by Nigel Farage’s party, were laid bare at the weekend by the Guardian in a leaked video of a chaotic internal meeting.
Councillors can be seen complaining about “backbiting” and being ignored by their leader, Linden Kemkaran, who tells them they will be “screwed” and that Reform can forget about winning the general election if they don’t balance Kent’s budget.
In an extraordinary recording, which shows the inner workings of Reform’s Kent operation, she shouts down fellow members before telling them they will be “muted” in scenes reminiscent of the viral “Jackie Weaver” video from a parish council Zoom meeting in 2021.
In a message sent after the Guardian published the video, Kemkaran told her fellow Reform councillors that a “thorough investigation” was being launched as she said she had passed on her suspicions about who was responsible for “this treachery” to Reform UK’s head office.
“To have people on the inside, who smile to our faces, sit next to us at meetings, share jokes, anecdotes, before stabbing us in the back is very sad indeed,” she said in the message.
“The people who did this are cowards. They are weak. They are foolish. They are incapable of displaying true courage themselves, so they look to harm those who are. They are obsessed with personal gain at the expense of group success. They cannot cope with disappointment and personal inadequacies so they seek to bring down others to their level.”
She added: “I want you to know … I passed my suspicions of who is responsible for this treachery to head office and a thorough investigation is already under way. The guilty parties will be expelled from the Reform party without delay. They will have no political future.”
It came as James Orr, an academic who is influential within Donald Trump’s administration, was appointed a senior adviser to Nigel Farage.
Reform UK welcomed Orr, an anti-abortion theologian at Cambridge whom JD Vance once described as his “British sherpa”, to his role on Sunday night.
Zia Yusuf, the party’s head of policy, described him as “a brilliant academic, theologian, thinker” who had been “a bastion of common sense and patriotism at Cambridge University”.
Kemkaran was facing pressure on Sunday over her comments in the footage, which was of a meeting which took place in late August. The leader of Medway council issued a statement saying he would be writing to her to seek clarification after she told Reform councillors at the leaked meeting that other leaders of Kent councils who she had met did not like her because she was a woman.
“To suggest I don’t like her because she is a woman is utterly ludicrous,” said Vince Maple, the Labour Medway council leader. He said her comments flew in the face of the “collaborative approach” Kent councils had to date when it came to working together over local government reform (LGR) plans.
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In the video, Kemkaran complained about other council leaders in Kent who she had been meeting recent weeks, accusing them of a “shocking” level of ignorance about the LGR plans and suggesting that they did not like her because she was a woman.
Kent county council, which has a £2.5bn annual budget, is considered to be a make-or-break showcase for whether Reform can be trusted to competently govern before a general election.
It faces two major challenges: the need to meet a legal duty to balance its budget, with resulting questions over whether Reform will have to hike council tax; the other centres on its response to national plans for LGR that would result in Kent’s councils in effect abolishing themselves.
Kemkaran was seen telling fellow Reform councillors at the meeting: “We are going to live or die on that budget. If we don’t balance the books you can forget Reform winning the next election. It’s that crucial.
“If we can avoid putting up council tax by the full 5%, that is going to be the best thing that we can do to show that Reform can actually run something as big as Kent council, because let’s not forget we are the shop window in KCC. People are looking at us, they are judging us every single day, every single minute of every single day. Nigel knows that. He is super-aware that we are the flagship council.”
