On the ground with Britain’s DOGE firebrands — in their boring office jobs

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MAIDSTONE, England — Half an hour into a Kent County Council meeting, council leader Linden Kemkaran has already taken aim at trans women in a “wig and a skirt” and migrants “invading” Britain.

This is the Garden of England — home to farmers, commuters, vineyards, seaside poverty, rich London escapees, and the beaches where tens of thousands of migrants have landed in inflatable dinghies — and it now belongs to Reform UK.

Nigel Farage’s populist right-wing party ended decades of center-right Conservative rule here in May’s local elections, winning 57 of 81 seats. Novice Reform councilors took over nine other English councils; in others it is the largest party, including Warwickshire, whose proposed leader is just 18 years old. If Reform’s national poll lead lasts, Farage could become prime minister in 2029.

It echoes a rise in the populist right across Europe — and Kemkaran, a blunt and hitherto obscure former BBC journalist (she was on staff until 2008), gives a taste of the raw politics to come.

She told a council meeting last week that women were in “grave danger of violence and sexual abuse” due to “hordes of men from deeply misogynistic and dare I say unenlightened cultures … invading our county.” She slammed politicians who believe a “man can somehow magically turn into a woman because he wears a wig and skirt.”

Inside County Hall, a thermometer on the wall nudged 27 degrees Celsius. Outside, a noisy band of trans rights protesters chanted: “Reform your mind!”

Yet as Kemkaran freely admits, running local government is about more than hardline language.

The firebrands have been forced into office jobs.

Reform councillors are running vast budgets on a platform to slash state “waste,” with little to no experience of local government. Senior Reform figures are already accusing council officers of underhanded opposition to their efficiency drive.

This is where the hard part starts — and the fireworks have begun.

The revolution will be on WhatsApp

“All the council lawyers are engaged in order to try to find ways to resist,” Zia Yusuf told POLITICO in an interview.

Yusuf, a combative former luxury concierge tycoon and Reform’s ex-chief executive, now leads a party unit calling itself the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — which aims to mimic its Elon Musk-founded U.S. namesake. It is in talks with Kent, Lincolnshire, Durham, Worcestershire and Northamptonshire.

“There’s going to be an immune response from the Blob, I’ve no doubt about that,” Yusuf added, using a term for unaccountable officials stuck in a statist mindset. “The chief execs and the monitoring officers of all the Reform councils have already formed their own WhatsApp groups.”

The British right’s war on the “Blob” is nothing new, but in Reform-run councils it is taking tangible form. While Kent’s £1.5 billion annual budget may appear ripe for cuts, much of it is tied into the provision of statutory services such as social care. Reform’s examples of waste so far have either been heavily disputed or form only a small proportion of the total.

And Yusuf has a more immediate problem: Reform-run councils still haven’t handed DOGE the reams of internal data that he wants in order to find waste. There are data protection hurdles, and Kent’s most senior lawyer and chief executive are still in talks with Reform HQ.

Kemkaran, who has set up her own “DOLGE” (the “L” stands for local), insisted it was her decision to look at data internally first. “As elected officials, we naturally can look at everything within the council, whereas Zia and his team are not elected officials, so there are a number of hoops to jump through,” she told POLITICO in an interview. “I’m sure quite soon we’ll have a framework with which we will then be able to very safely share selected pieces of data with Zia and his team.”

Yet Yusuf, while insisting he is not frustrated by the hold-up, believes council officers are standing in his way.

“The auspice of that for the Blob, is, oh yeah, they’re trying to work out how best they can move things forward in the most efficient way possible,” he said. “I think anyone with half a brain cell knows exactly what’s going on.”

One chief executive of a large English authority, granted anonymity to speak frankly, said they would be “surprised” if fellow CEOs and lawyers were really trying to block Reform’s plans. They admitted WhatsApp conversations are “ubiquitous” for officers to ask each other for advice — but said they don’t “plot” and “don’t like to air their dirty laundry in front of others.”

A Labour politician in Kent, also granted anonymity, said council CEOs and legal officers have regular WhatsApp chats — but insisted that is “perfectly normal.” They added: “Nobody at Kent County Council has come to me and said ‘this is the worst lot we’ve ever dealt with,’ because they’re professionals. Maybe they’re thinking it, but I don’t know.”

Yet the clash is real, at least in some quarters. A “well-placed County Hall employee” has started writing an anonymous column for the local Kent Messenger newspaper.

Yusuf insists it is “obviously true that it is the chief executives who ultimately run these councils, and not the elected officials.” Kemkaran, for her part, seems to be trying to tilt the scales back. She repeatedly refers to Kent’s most senior official as “my chief executive.”

Until the revolution, a strange kind of limbo persists.

This month’s meeting in Kent saw both furious invective and bland bureaucracy — written by officials and read out line-for-line by Reform councilors. Cabinet members spoke of “critical safety enhancements” and “additional workforce capacity” to reduce a 16-week wait for disabled parking badges, along with initiatives to stop smoking. (At least one Kent resident, heavy smoker Nigel Farage, seems unlikely to comply.)

“It’s a bit uncanny,” Paul Francis told me during one boilerplate speech. The 63-year-old, who spent three decades covering politics for the Messenger and its sister newspapers, was looking down from the public gallery on a sea of ties, blazers and dresses (and even a headband) in Reform’s signature teal. He added: “All the Reform councilors are sitting in the same seats and behaving the same way as the Tories. You could be forgiven for thinking you were back in the days when this was a true-blue shire.”

SEND for help

Two and a half months in, Reform’s hunt for waste is still getting off the ground.

Kemkaran used Kent’s latest meeting to announce £40 million in reputed savings. They included “up to” £180,000 from cancelling subscriptions, £32 million over four years from ditching a program of renewable energy property modifications, and £7.5 million (by 2030) from scrapping a transition of Kent’s fleet to electric vehicles.

Yusuf also plans to announce savings in the way Reform-led councils allocate their pension schemes “probably around the end of this month,” he told POLITICO. While providing no details, he said the party would look at fees and “underperformance,” adding: “These are going to be very, very large sums.”

Yusuf also talks of taxpayer cash funding trips for asylum seekers to “safari parks, skate parks and the circus.”

But there are no cuts to be seen yet in the thorniest and most politically sensitive areas — home-to-school transport for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), and social care for vulnerable adults.

On a trip to Kent earlier this month, Farage said spending on home-to-school transport was “beyond belief” (it is budgeted to cost the council £98 million in 2025-2026, thanks in part to a rise in pupils with SEND). Kent’s cabinet member for transport, Bill Barrett, was sacked later that day.

A key issue is whether Reform merely wants to make contracts more efficient — such as by asking children to share taxis — or if it believes some children now getting home-to-school transport should not be eligible.

For Yusuf, it’s both. He told POLITICO that some parents want to turn down SEND transport but are terrified of losing other benefits. “If we carry on down this path, if everyone has a disability, then ultimately, technically no one has. If every child is SEND then technically no child is, because we will run out of money.

“If [the rise in SEND provision] keeps compounding … every one of these councils is bankrupted several times over, over the next 10 to 15 years.”

One Conservative politician in Kent, who asked for anonymity, said there were still savings to be found in taxi contracts for SEND transport but “if anyone thinks there’s a crock of gold that nobody’s managed to think about, you’re going to get disappointed.”

The picture is also tricky in adult social care, where the same person said contracts with care home providers are “knotty” and legally hard to unpick.

Reform figures agree it will not be easy.

Kemkaran declined to give POLITICO details on when more savings will be found, or how big they will be. “How long is a piece of string?” she said. “This has never been done before. We’ve got nothing to measure it by … I’m dealing with a massive, massive organization here. I’ve been in post [for] seven weeks.”

Peter Osborne, three days after he replaced Barrett as Kent’s transport chief, put it more bluntly. “We most certainly do have a plan,” he told one opponent in the meeting. “We just haven’t chosen to let you know about it yet.”

Some of Reform’s promises are already floating back down to earth. A council leader in Leicestershire said in May that the party would “be able to cut council tax,” but Farage later said cutting waste was the bigger priority.

Yusuf, speaking to POLITICO, went further: “I think anyone who looked at the numbers knows that the idea of council tax coming down is not going to happen, given the pressures in terms of social care.

“What we can talk about is council tax in Reform councils increasing slower than other councils. I think that’s a sensible target.”

War over cuts

While councilors get their feet under their desks, the political battle over DOGE’s war on “waste” — and its methods — is already hot.

Kemkaran asked her cabinet members to list the biggest problems of all their departments on two sides of a piece of paper last month, Barrett told POLITICO shortly after his sacking.

Barrett accused the Kent Reform group of being “obsessed with contracts and money-saving” and said they were “ruled from headquarters.” He said that in the final meeting with cabinet colleagues before he lost his role, he was challenged as to why he hadn’t gone out personally to watch highways officials doing their jobs, or called taxi firms that have SEND contracts to see if he could get better fares over the phone.

Kent’s “DOLGE” is run by three elected Reform councilors, but no council officers are working on it full-time and it is — self-evidently — not an impartial audit by an accountancy firm. Instead, the trio of councilors “have got free rein,” Kemkaran said. “They can go into any department. They can ask any questions.”

Several examples of waste that Reform has found so far have been branded as misleading by political opponents. Yusuf posted that Kent had tendered a £350 million contract for recruitment services — only for critics to say it involves recruiting for Kent and other councils for a commercial rate. One political opponent fumed that Yusuf’s claims were “utter BS.”

Yusuf defended his stance, though a note to Kent councilors this week from Reform HQ rowed back slightly. The document said “after Zia queried the spend it was revealed that it was nuanced,” and Reform was “glad this was brought to our attention and we are now armed with the full facts.”

There is also a political row over Kemkaran’s announcement that she will halt the proposed sale of Kent County Council’s HQ. She said cancelling the plans will save funds, but opponents argue the building is a “money pit” that will need costly maintenance into the future.

The more Reform councilors learn about the fine print, the more they risk getting cold feet. Barrett said he would not support cuts in home-to-school transport if they “fail to allow any child to go to school” who uses the service now. Yusuf may feel differently.

Marching on to government

Labour politicians hope that the inexperience of Reform councilors, and the reality of the “hard choices” they make, will discredit them in the eyes of the electorate before 2029. “They’ll reveal themselves as who they really are,” one MP predicted.

Many Conservatives hope so too. One Tory politician in Kent said: “They’re blundering around trying to make big bold statements but finding the minutiae of local government rather tedious and difficult.”

Reform will inevitably be asked how its views would translate into government policy. Yusuf told POLITICO that social care budgets “are compounding at a frightening rate, and the only way that can be truly addressed fundamentally is … through a bill in Westminster.” He did not spell out what such a bill would do.

But for now at least, few voters are paying attention to the minutiae. Many more are drawn to Reform’s message of change — as well as the authority that comes with elected office.

One Labour MP recently observed that Reform activists now have fewer tattoos and more shirts. “Reform canvassers look like Tories now,” they said.

Ryan Wain, executive director of politics at the Tony Blair Institute think tank, said the mood in focus groups has shifted as well. “It’s gone beyond people switching from Labour to Reform out of mere protest,” he said. “They now say they’re actively looking forward to a Reform government that would guarantee change.”

Wain said there is “a window of opportunity” for Labour: “Voters say if this government can deliver on the promise of change and they see progress, they would be willing to reconsider their vote.”

But Yusuf is banking on a vibe shift too. “I think this country can be an awesome, prosperous and powerful country again,” he said. “I still think there’s a window. It’s closing fast. If Nigel doesn’t win, if we don’t win in 2029, I don’t think there’s a path back for the country.”

For Francis, who in 29 years covering Kent County Council saw only three Tory leaders, the change has already been fundamental — helped in part by years of discontent at small boat crossings of the English Channel (which are not within the council’s control).

“Reform scored a comprehensive victory,” he said. ‘You know, I hadn’t anticipated that at all. I thought they might hold the balance of power, perhaps. But you know, to return 50-odd councilors — not even in [their] heyday did the Tories have as many.

“It’s the tectonic plates of politics changing — people voting less tribally, and attracted by a party which says it’s on the side of the voters.”

England’s sparsely-attended county halls will play a small part in deciding if things stay that way.

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