In the damp, dog-eared corners of British public life, where politics has long since traded the honest sweat of the workshop for the synthetic sheen of the focus group, one occasionally stumbles upon a figure so refreshingly unvarnished that he seems to have wandered in from an Ealing comedy that somehow survived the Blair era. Enter Robert Kenyon, plumber, Army Reservist, ex-NHS hand, and now Reform UK’s candidate in the Makerfield by-election. A man who, according to his supporters, has already weathered the ritual scourging of modern democracy: those awkward social media posts from yesteryear, exhumed and brandished like medieval relics by the righteous. Cancel culture, they call it. More like the political equivalent of your mother finding your teenage diary and reading it aloud at Christmas.
One looks at Kenyon—rifle in hand in his reservist uniform, the very picture of a man who has fixed boilers and served Queen and country—and feels a pang of nostalgia for the species of politician that Britain once produced without thinking. The Mr Smith Goes to Westminster type: local, rooted, slightly rumpled, possessed of the dangerous notion that representing one’s neighbours might involve understanding how their drains work and what time the buses actually run. These were men (and occasionally women) who had done something before they did politics. They had calluses, not just position papers. They had met a payroll, or missed one. They knew the price of a pint and the weight of a grievance.
Alas, that sturdy breed has largely been culled. In its place we have the professional politician: smooth as a Teflon-coated conscience, fluent in the dialect of the think-tank, and about as connected to the daily realities of Makerfield as a management consultant is to the concept of honest toil. They glide from student union to special adviser to safe seat with the effortless grace of a ballroom dancer who has never had to worry about the electricity bill. Their idea of working-class authenticity is remembering to drop their aitches during the local radio interview.
And here lies the deeper irony, for while we in Britain lament the disappearance of the authentic local candidate, it has somehow become even harder to find one across the Atlantic. America, that great noisy republic once famed for sending farmers, shopkeepers, and the odd war hero to Washington, now finds itself largely governed by a different sort. The bored urban housewife who decamped to the countryside for 'the lifestyle' discovered that parish council seats were available, and decided public service would make an amusing hobby between Pilates and sourcing the right shade of Farrow & Ball for the guest cottage. One pictures her arriving at the town meeting with a reusable coffee cup and a sheaf of notes about 'community cohesion', while the local mechanic quietly wonders who will fix the potholes that have been swallowing his customers’ suspensions since the last ice age.
Britain has not quite sunk to that level of genteel amateurism, though we are trying our best. Our own version tends toward the career activist or the quangocrat who has spent decades being paid by the taxpayer to worry about the taxpayer. Andy Burnham, the opponent in this particular bout, is a polished specimen of the breed: telegenic, articulate, the sort of man who can deliver a soundbite about 'levelling up' without once betraying the suspicion that he knows what a spirit level actually looks like. He has the professional politician’s greatest gift: the ability to look deeply concerned about problems he helped create, or at the very least, failed to notice until the focus groups rang the alarm.
Against this backdrop, Robert Kenyon stands as a minor miracle of the sort that gives one cautious, qualified hope. Not because he is perfect—perfection in politics is usually the first warning sign of a coming tyranny—but because he is gloriously, defiantly imperfect in all the right ways. A man who has wrenched pipes and worn the uniform. Someone who might, just possibly, view a constituent’s complaint about housing or jobs through the prism of lived experience rather than the latest briefing paper from the Institute for Sounding Plausible. One hopes his working-class credentials prove more durable than the inevitable barrage of metropolitan sneers that will come his way. The commentariat will no doubt dismiss him as 'populist', that favourite slur of people who believe democracy should be restricted to those with the correct opinions and the right accent.
Whether the voters of Makerfield will choose the plumber over the professional remains to be seen. But in an age when politics has become a branch of performance art for the credentialed classes, the mere presence of a candidate who looks like he could unblock your sink while discussing defence procurement is something approaching revolutionary. It may not be Mr Smith Goes to Washington. But in today’s Britain, Mr Kenyon Goes to the By-Election feels like the closest thing we have to a plot worth following. One can only hope the audience still has the good sense to cheer for the man with the wrench rather than the man with the script.