Reform UK has secured its first elected member of Kent County Council, winning a surprise victory this time last week (November 21).

Thomas Mallon, 48, who won in Swanscombe and Greenhithe, enters Sessions House in Maidstone at a time of economic uncertainty and as local government looks set for a massive shake-up. Local Democracy Reporter Simon Finlay met up with him…

For a man brought up on the rough streets in Glasgow’s working class west end in a Roman Catholic household, it might come as a surprise that one of the first political figures that caught Thomas Mallon’s notice was the Ulster unionist firebrand, Rev Ian Paisley.

Watching John Craven’s Newsround in the late-1970s and early 80s, he was immediately struck by the man’s powerful rhetoric and charisma, despite being somewhat at odds with his own religious and political background.

The Mallon household was left-leaning Labour - his mother later followed the Scottish National Party - and devout devotees of Glasgow Celtic FC, in the “green” half of a divided city.

“I don’t know what it was about Paisley,” he reflects. “He could always give rousing speeches, that’s for sure.

“But I probably didn’t know much about his politics at the time but he had a way of capturing his audience and certainly had a presence.”

Back then, Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party was on the outer edges of Northern Irish politics, a small but dynamic outfit dwarfed by the Ulster Unionists but who, in time, came to be the one that delivered peace to a troubled province after decades of civil conflict.

That Paisley would chum up with Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness in devolved government in 2007 at Stormont, hailing a new democratic era, scarcely seemed thinkable 20 years before.

The Protestant/Catholic tribes in Glasgow are every bit as fractured and deadly serious as they are in Belfast and Glaswegians understand the nuances better than most. Mr Mallon has no time for sectarianism.

In a bar abroad on holiday, he, a Celtic supporter, was with some Rangers-supporting friends. Another group of Scots heard the accents and one asked the dreaded question: “Who do you support?” No one ever knows how answering that question might end up.

Mr Mallon has learnt the safest way to swerve that potentially hostile situation is to reply: “Clyde, actually.”

One fancies Mr Mallon is drawn to disruptors; people who like to put a bit of stick about the old order. He cites Neil Kinnock as one, having taken on the Militant Tendency in the 1980s and won, thus clearing the path for New Labour.

Margaret Thatcher is another - who crushed the might of the unions and allowed people to buy their council houses. And, of course, Nigel Farage, the Brexiteer who has created minor political earthquakes with UKIP, The Brexit Party and lately Reform UK.

Of Thatcher, he recalls: “I remember that she commanded respect at the time. Where I grew up, we still had gas street lights and the Glasgow of that time was run down not a very nice place.

“But the regeneration that followed was probably down to Thatcher’s government putting a stop to decline when everything seemed to be going backwards with unions always on strike.

“Mind you, I couldn’t have told anyone in my family something like that at the time because I grew up in a pretty left-wing household.”

Mr Mallon has voted SNP, Labour and UKIP in the past and he has little truck for those who do not cast their ballots because “you can’t moan about who you get”.

He studied politics at NVQ level but it did not play a part in his early jobs. The first, was as a trainee chef, although he had actually wanted to be a fireman.

“I don’t think my Mum wanted me to do that job, sort of tricked me out of it by telling me that I would never get through the chemistry test.”

A chef’s life was not for him.

“I didn’t like the split shifts. Morning through to 3pm and then back in again in the evening until 11pm - it did nothing for a 17-year-old’s lifestyle, I can tell you.”

He drifted into retail - first at the electrical retailer Dixons and later as a turf accountant for Ladbrokes. It was there he met someone who introduced him to the building trade.

Mr Mallon is partly responsible for the roof on the Bluewater shopping complex and that atop the Darent Valley Hospital. He celebrated his 21st birthday in Gravesend and made his life here.

Now settled in Northfleet with his wife Melinda, from Chatham, he eventually went into warehouse management, although he is currently acting as Melinda’s full-time carer following an accident she suffered at work.

At the General Election in July, Mr Mallon contested the Chatham and Aylesford constituency for Reform UK and polled well above the party’s 14% national average with 24.5% of the vote, coming in a close third behind the Tories and the Labour winner Tristan Osborne.

Interestingly, the Electoral Calculus polling analysis service currently has the Conservatives set to win the seat (held previously by Tracey Crouch) by 0.1% with Reform UK in second.

Wearing a smart blue suit and striped tie with a union flag pin on his lapel, Mr Mallon says: “I’m not a political animal as such but I have always kept an eye on politics and only became active two years ago.

“After Brexit, the country just seemed to go down a bad road and we just watched MPs stalling the Brexit process for years. Nothing happened.

“I liked Nigel Farage and I have voted for UKIP in the past. So I looked at Reform UK’s Contract for the People and the policies, to me, were based on common sense. Things like raising the tax allowances for working families. This would promote work, raise tax revenues while putting money in working people’s pockets.”

He is in favour of a one-in-one-out for vetted legal immigrants. As for illegal immigration, Britain should use existing powers to take immigrants straight back to France, he says.

So, what of Sir Keir Starmer’s pre-election pledge to “smash the gangs” of traffickers and the cross-Channel people smuggling routes?

“That’s just chit-chat,” he says. “I remember slogans in the 1980s and 90s about the drug gangs and that’s not going well, is it?”

In five months’ time, Mr Mallon, a father of one grown-up daughter, will have to defend his Swanscombe and Greenhithe seat at County Hall when the Kent County Council elections swing round once more.

So how does he think Reform UK will fare?

“I think people will be very surprised,” he contends. “We’ll do well across the country. People are very disenfranchised at the moment - they don’t want the Tories and they’re sick of Labour already after four and a bit months. So, we’ll have to see.”