Royal Tunbridge Wells is a proud town. Its chest swells courtesy of its regal links, its splendid architecture, green spaces and powerful sense of civic pride.

The villages which surround it – and within the boundaries of Tunbridge Wells Borough Council – are often chocolate-box hamlets.

To the rest of the county it is seen as something of an outlier and epitome of an affluent town.

Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, it is also famous for being among the ‘true blue’ Conservative heartlands. But not anymore.

Today it is far more a rainbow coalition than the cliched ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ would have ever dreamt possible.

“No other council in Kent has had the catastrophe that the Conservatives have had in Tunbridge Wells,” explains Seán Holden, a councillor on the local authority since 2008. And he’s a Tory.

“I haven’t heard the phrase ‘you could put a pig in a blue rosette and it would get elected in Tunbridge Wells’ since the pandemic,” adds the leader of the council, Liberal Democrat Ben Chapelard.

He adds: “To my mind, and to a lot of people I speak to, the perception of Tunbridge Wells as Tory heartland lags behind the reality. The town is affluent for sure, but it is also more educated, professional, and connected than either the average, or to other Tory seats.

“We are 45 minutes from London on the train and the only Kent borough to vote Remain in the 2016 Brexit referendum. And as Tunbridge Wells has moved in one direction, the Conservatives have moved in another.”

To put it in some form of context, up until 2021 the borough had been under a Conservative administration – bar a brief four-year stint in the mid-1990s – since its creation as a borough in 1974.

During all that time it has consistently voted in Conservative MPs with varying degress of comfortable majorities. Before that, when it formed part of the now disbanded Tonbridge constituency, it had been so blue its blood was as royal as its prefix.

But while, just four years ago, it held a dominant 41 out of 48 seats on the local council, successive elections (unlike most other authorities in Kent, a third of its seats are contested at a time) have seen that now whittled down to just 11 following last month’s outing to the polls.

Today the council remains with no party in overall control – but never has there been a more diverse group of councillors sat in its chamber.

The Liberal Democrats – so long the Tory party’s main rival in the area – increased its councillor count to 17 to be dominant but not command a majority.

Young upstarts the Tunbridge Wells Alliance Party – formed five years ago to, among other things “ensure that a proper balance is struck between conservation and development” (how very Tunbridge Wells) – took 11 seats. The same as the once all-conquering Conservatives.

Labour, a party which has traditionally struggled in the area, brought its clutch of seats up to an impressive eight.

Of course, changes in political colour is nothing new across our local councils. But this, let us not forget, is Tunbridge Wells. And the reason for the Conservative collapse is one all administrations across the country – let alone just Kent – should be alert to.

The cauldron in which this shift in political preference has been concocted has seen a variety of ingredients added over recent years. There’s the tang of that civic pride, the sour taste of disillusionment, a twist of complacency, a pinch of too much inward focus and a sprinkle of a shifting demographic.

“What really knocked the local Conservative administration was the appalling mishandling of the Calverley Square project,” explains Alex Britcher-Allan, Labour councillor since 2021 for the Rusthall ward – a ward represented now, for the first time by two Labour councillors, both of whom, in another first, are women.

The project was just the latest bid by the Tory-led adminstration to find a solution to a problem which had long dogged it. Its Town Hall headquarters, in the centre of the town, is an imposing Grade II-listed building. Yet it is in need of significant investment to bring it up to modern standards. The public building also comprises the Assembly Hall theatre next door.

In 2009/10, moves were afoot to move the council out, and sell the building. But amid claims of a fait accompli, the rebellion from locals saw the brakes slammed on and the councillors with some explaining to do. It ultimately led to the dethroning of its then council leader, Roy Bullock.

Fast forward less than ten years and the council unveiled hugely ambitious plans to move both its HQ and the theatre down to the bottom of Mount Pleasant Road into a site opposite the town’s railway station.

Calverley Square would have been a £100 million-plus scheme which would have intruded into part of the town’s much-treasured Calverley Grounds park.

Explains Cllr Holden, Conservative ward councillor for Benenden and Cranbrook: “That’s when the rout began. The final number we heard as to its cost was £118m.

“That was going to lumber us with a debt for 50 years for which we would be paying interest of £2.3m a year. Even many Conservatives ended up opposing it.”

Needless to say, this went down even worse than the previous effort.

Not only did the good folk of Tunbridge Wells voice their anger – there were literally protests on the street – but they took action at the ballot box. An early casualty? Leader David Jukes who was drummed out of one of the safest Tory seats in the borough for being the man championing the project. How quickly, it seemed, lessons are forgotten.

Explains Cllr Britcher-Allan: “At the time Calverley Square was announced, the Conservatives held 41 out of the 48 seats on the council so faced no real challenge.

“But they didn’t consult with the public. The outcry was so great they had to abandon the project after wasting over £10m on it.

“This was the origins of the Tunbridge Wells Alliance.”

The Alliance is what the town had long threatened – a politically active residents’ action group, unaligned to a political party, which decided peaceful protest was not enough to change things.

It provided, says Cllr Holden, “a very handy place for Conservative voters to place their vote instead of having to hold their nose and vote for the Lib Dems or Labour”.

Nick Pope was its first councillor, elected in 2018. He explains: “As a residents’ group, we would lobby the council. But we realised just turning up at meetings and speaking for three minutes and often having no response made it feel pointless. So we felt the only way to be listened to was to sit in the chamber as a councillor.

“Calverley Square was the thing that launched us. It gave us a high profile.”

Since his election, ten party colleagues have joined him in that chamber. The scheme was eventually scrapped at the end of 2019 but the Alliance party continues – and says it has no plans on going anywhere.

He adds: “I think we've helped to make people more aware of what's happening locally in politics - what the options are, how it works.”

There’s also been a gradual demographic shift in the borough; an increasing number of families moving out of London and into the commuter-friendly town and its desireable schools; fuelled at least in part by the pandemic’s ushering in of more flexible working.

Adds Cllr Pope: “There has been a trickle of people moving out of London who are probably less likely to vote Conservative. Some do, but a bigger proportion vote for other parties – probably more Liberal than anything. But that's been going on for decades.”

Time enough, it could be said, for a subtle shift in the population’s political leanings, perhaps?

Cllr Chapelard certainly thinks so. He adds: “Think of it this way: Thirty years ago when people moved here to bring up their families, they mostly voted Conservative. Now hardly any of them do. Year on year that is having an effect. People moving into the area also know that elections here are between the Conservatives and us. Labour voters are willing to lend us their support to oust the Tories.”

For the Conservatives it’s been a soul-destroying period. Dragged further down by its performance nationally and not helped but a perception that the local authority is too focused on the town itself and not its outlying areas.

Explains Cllr Holden, from his home in Cranbrook: “I think Tunbridge Wells has always been pretty pleased with itself as a town. It regards itself as a special place.

“Where I'm sitting right now I'm equidistant between Tunbridge Wells, Hastings, Maidstone and Ashford. So Tunbridge Wells is not particularly my local town. That's a problem of the Local Government Act of 1972 in setting up borough councils where areas are tacked onto a major town. The continuing problem with that is the town produces the bulk of councillors and so they look to it and the outside areas get neglected.

“Tunbridge Wells is very inward looking. It has a very high opinion of itself and the councillors it elects share that opinion. That's to the detriment of the outlying areas where the Conservative strength is now.”

Although the evidence suggests that even those areas are no longer Tory strongeholds. Some nine of the Alliance party’s 11 seats sit outside the town itself – with representation in the likes of Brenchley, Goudhurst and Lamberhurst.

But while much of the talk is around the Lib Dems, Alliance and Tory parties, Labour is sneaking up on the outside.

Jayne Sharratt was elected as the other Rusthall councillor in May for the party.

“We think Labour has performed strongly,” she explains, “since 2019 we’ve gone from two to eight councillors, which is brilliant considering a lot of the borough is very rural and traditionally true blue Conservative.”

With the Lib-Dems, TW Alliance and Labour all on the rise, is there any way back for the Conservatives?

“I do think the Conservatives will come back,” says Cllr Holden, perhaps not unsurprisingly. “I think, aside from the Town Hall plans, it governed Tunbridge Wells very well. It's quite interesting to see the contrast in the year in which this coalition has been in place that they've done nothing.They don't seem to know what they should be doing.

“It's an expression of the people's will that they should be running the council, but the consequence of taking it over so quickly and completely is that they have no experience.

“I think it will be a long haul but I don't see the Alliance just disappearing in a puff of smoke, as much as I would like them to.”