General election: meet reform UK's Makerfield candidate

But when the Reform UK Makerfield candidate grew old enough to think for himself, his own allegiance to the party, now led by Sir Keir Starmer, drifted away.

Even so, having been raised in a town where the coal mining industry was controversially decimated by the Conservative government of the 1980s, hitching his wagon to the Tories was “unthinkable”.

“When you’re from Wigan, because of what happened in the ‘80s when they closed the coal mines, there is no way I would ever vote Conservative,” said the British Army reservist Lance Corporal and plumber.

“In fact, I don’t think the Conservatives will ever win a parliamentary seat in Wigan, for that reason.”

However, Wigan Warriors fan Mr Kenyon says he joined Reform UK because he felt “politically homeless”.

Because of his part-time military background Mr Kenyon refuses to discuss Reform leader Nigel Farage’s controversial view that the West provoked Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine by the eastern expansion of the European Union and NATO.

“I am not allowed to voice an opinion of stuff like that,” he said. But otherwise, he said: “I had a look around and thought who I would like to vote for and, like many people, I felt the other parties had let people down. I felt we needed a clean slate.

“Yes, I was brought up in a Labour household. My dad was Labour, but I started thinking ‘hang on a minute’. I started thinking for myself.

“I thought about the Iraq War and how Labour sold off the gold reserves and the mass immigration that we didn’t ask or vote for.”

But the father-of-one refutes any suggestion that opposition to so-called ‘mass immigration’ may indicate that Reform UK is racist party.

“What attracts me to them is that they have made certain that anyone with extremist or racist ideology cannot be in the party,” he continued. “They are very good at keeping out the racist elements.”

He says that issues emerging on the Makerfield doorsteps ahead of the July 4 General Election are the over-stretched NHS, the cost-of-living crisis, immigration and crime.

“I’m sick of smelling cannabis when I am driving around,” he said. “All you have to do is walk down the Ashton-in-Makerfield high street and can smell people smoking it in the cars. This just wasn’t the case five years ago.

Mr Kenyon, a specialist in the martial art of Muay Thai, is also fuming about the potholes around the Makerfield constituency.

“Sometimes it’s like driving over the surface of Mars,” he said. “I’m sure some of Neil Armstrong’s footprints are in our street.”

Meanwhile, Mr Kenyon has a sharp response to the notion that a vote for Reform UK, will effectively help Labour win the election.

“In Makerfield, a vote for the Conservatives is a vote for Labour,” he said. “The Conservatives had an 80-seat majority and wasted billions of pounds during the Covid pandemic and opened up the floodgates to mass immigration and effectively betrayed the British people. I am confident, I will either win the seat or come second.”

Mr Kenyon does not believe Reform UK are necessarily a right wing party. “Some of their policies are quite left wing,” he said. “Like the state taking a 50 per cent ownership of the critical infrastructure companies with the other half being owned by UK pension funds.

“I think the party has taken bits from the left and bits from the right. It’s like President Ronald Reagan once said, ‘it’s not about left and right, it’s about forward and backwards’.”