Linden Kemkaren Profiled

Linden Kemkaren has often been in the the headlines during her first six months running Kent County Council, but how did her BBC and freelance career lead her to Kent's top job?

Every election day for decades, the porch in the country church in Leeds, near Maidstone, is turned into a polling station. Voters use one of two booths, pop their ballot papers into the box and take a Jelly Baby or two from a dish on the way out.

It never does a roaring trade.

On the afternoon of May 1, as Kent’s residents exercised their democratic right, a stranger appeared and plonked herself outside on a fold-up seat outside to act as a teller for Reform UK.

A staff member asked the new arrival to move to another part of the church yard as it is customary for party representatives to position themselves further away from the main door.

An onlooker remembers an “exchange of views” between the staffer and the party official and a stand off ensued until the stranger eventually moved a few yards up the path on the church side of the gate. There is no suggestion the stranger was doing anything wrong, but an uneasy compromise was eventually reached.

Those who witnessed the spat were surprised a few days later to see in the news that she had been elected as leader of Kent County Council, after Reform swept into County Hall with an unassailable 57 of the 81 seats. It was Linden Kemkaran.

Cllr Kemkaran’s Maidstone south east division is an odd mix of once true blue Tory voters in superficially quaint rural villages, like Leeds, chunks of semi-urbanised areas which were once countryside as well as a section of the sprawling Shepway estate, where the vote can be promiscuous but is currently fairly safe ground for Reform.

Cllr Kemkaran won the seat with 51% of the vote, eclipsing the second place Conservative Richard Chesson (17%) by some margin, albeit on a pitiful 23% turnout.

Long-time Leeds resident Monica Wrattan and her husband Dave did not vote in the KCC elections.

How does she think the new administration has performed? Mrs Wrattan is blunt.

“Poor”, she says, “I have got no time for Reform UK.”

Mrs Wrattan is 82 in December, fit as a fiddle, and she keeps across local news on her tablet. Not much gets past her.

She is clearly unimpressed with the video which appeared on the Guardian website a fortnight ago, which sparked a public and political backlash and eventually a slew of expulsions from the party of those alleged to be disloyal.

The whole debacle was torn apart on the BBC satirical TV show, Have I Got News For You, clips of which were shared widely through local political WhatsApp groups.

“She’s turned the place into a laughing stock,” says Mrs Wrattan. “I’m sorry – she is just not up to the job. The problem isn’t the councillors, it’s her.

“When I saw that video of her I thought she was totally out of order. Of course, it was naughty of someone to have put it into the public domain but it did give you an insight.”

Since May 1, the village parish council has seen neither hide nor hair of former BBC journalist Cllr Kemkaran and clerk Sherrie Babington has been tasked to write to her and ask her to show up.

“She needs to know what’s going on in her patch. Her predecessor (Conservative Gary Cooke) really cared about things that matter to us, like the Leeds-Langley relief road,” said one parish councillor.

Like Leeds, it’s hard to find anyone on the Shepway estate who actually voted in May; fewer still those who will now admit they voted for Reform.
It’s a far cry from the sunny Thursday morning in May when virtually everyone traipsing out of the local polling station cheerfully said they had either deserted the Conservatives or Labour to go turquoise.

Asked if they recognised the name Linden Kemkaran, road worker Charlie Fuller, 32, and his partner Leah, 30, looked stumped.

“Wouldn’t have a clue, to be honest. Is that a woman?,” replies Charlie, distracted momentarily. “This used to be a nice place to live, here, when me and Leah were growing up…”

One senses a “but” on the way and then, as if on cue, an unmarked police car races past, sirens sounding and blue lights flashing.
“That happens all the time these days,” he says.

Charlie nods towards the building work behind Shepway’s parade of shops which will soon be replaced as part of a new phased regeneration housing project by social provider Golding Homes.

Called Fielding Park, the development will provide 236 new “energy efficient, affordable homes” as part of an aim to “create a vibrant community where people are proud to live”.

Locals fear the new stock will be gobbled up by London boroughs looking for overspill places.

In 2019, Cllr Kemkaran stood in a Sevenoaks council election seat for the Conservatives in the Eastern ward and lost convincingly, an experience she recorded in the Spectator magazine shortly afterwards.

It came after a time of immense change for her, having taken voluntary redundancy from the BBC on the eve of the financial crash in 2008 and invested it in property. Cllr Kemkaran bought, transformed and sold six houses during financial turbulence from which, it has been argued, the country never recovered fully.

“I reckoned I could apply the same grit to politics,” she wrote. “I had been dipping my toe into the political waters for a while, trying on various activist roles for size.

“But finally cutting my 20-year staff and freelance ties with the BBC last summer meant I was now free to actually stand. I must admit it took a certain number of deep breaths to come out and nail my true political colours to one mast after so many years of being professionally impartial.”

Cllr Kemkaran hinted at her longer-term ambitions, that politics needed more women and had to be changed from the inside out.

She wrote: “I’m a great believer in putting my money where my mouth is…all I can say is watch this space.”

The novice got onto the Tory candidates’ list to fight Bradford East a few months later, in December 2019, although she did not win a seat in Boris Johnson’s ‘Get Brexit Done’ landslide general election victory. Rather, her time in West Yorkshire was remembered for a Tweet she endorsed – and later regretted – about Muslim culture.

A Sevenoaks Conservative colleague remembered: “It was all quite a storm at the time but in the end it did do her a lot of damage within the Conservative Party.”

So who is Linden Kemkaran?

She was born in Kent to a Trinidadian father and white mother, both teachers, and grew up in the county.

Earlier this year, she told the Business Magazine’s Nicky Godding: “I am the daughter of an immigrant and I wouldn’t be here unless immigration was encouraged by the government of the time, but it must be controlled.

“Some people might say that I’m pulling the ladder up after my family benefited from it, but that’s not it at all. We simply must have a say in who we invite to live and work here. Uncontrolled immigration has made our country poorer and less secure.

“I’m half black, half white and I’ve lived through hideous racism. I was beaten up after school for being the little brown kid with no friends. That all changed when I was a teenager but until then my life was difficult.”

In 1991, according to LinkedIn, Cllr Kemkaran worked as a personal secretary to a senior member of the defence establishment before studying English, drama and theatre at the University of Surrey, joining the BBC in 1998. Give or take, spent two decades at the corporation as a journalist, producer and reporter.

She is married to a senior executive at a Kent health authority and has a family, living near Headcorn where she has been contemplating joining the burgeoning trend for English wine by starting a vineyard to either make the stuff or sell the grapes.

Her viticultural ambitions were disclosed in an article for the Spectator – seemingly her confessional – as was the revelation that she was nearly 40 in 2008 when she discovered “that I had an older brother”.

She wrote in the magazine in 2021: “My lifelong family position as the eldest of four evaporated in a flash one Sunday afternoon in 2008 when my mother called us all together at her house saying that she had something she needed to tell us.

“She opened a box file with trembling fingers, pulled out a black and white photo of a baby. It turned out that my mum, who died suddenly and unexpectedly of Covid in February of this year, had been one of a number of unmarried women…forced to give up their babies for adoption between the 1950s and 1970s.”

As was displayed in the leaked video and her reaction to it, she is not a woman given to holding back.

Cllr Kemkaran had only been in Reform UK a short time before she won her seat and, a week later, she was elevated to leader of the country’s largest local authority, with 1.6m people and a £2.5bn annual turnover.

Until now, she has been regarded as a poster girl for Reform UK’s outward ambitions. To have as the leader of its biggest authority, a bright, ambitious, mixed heritage woman, who is plain speaking and not a little ruthless, as the recently expelled have learnt.

The lack of political and local government experience in the top team and the recent controversies come as little surprise to the members of the former Conservative administration, one or two of whom (accurately) gave Reform “about six months before the wheels start to wobble”.

But former Conservative colleagues remember Cllr Kemkaran well, speaking of a “highly intelligent, articulate and quick-witted” woman who tends not to suffer fools for long.

One senior figure in the Sevenoaks area, said of her rapid rise in Reform: “They could have made a worse choice of leader than Linden, in my view.”