Reform UK has selected a teenager to permanently run a major county council, overseeing hundreds of millions of pounds of public spending.
George Finch, 18, took over temporarily after the previous council leader, also a member of Reform, resigned just weeks after being elected.
Now the 18-year-old has been selected by Nigel Farage’s party to head Warwickshire County Council, which has £1.5bn of assets and a budget of around £500m.
The Labour MP for Birmingham Edgbaston, Preet Gill, has criticised the decision, saying the people of Warwickshire “frankly deserve better”.
“This is not work experience,” she told the BBC. “This is not about learning on the job.”
Mr Finch, a former Tory, was installed as the full-time leader of the Reform group after a vote on Friday.
Reform is the largest party on the council but does not have an outright majority, meaning he will need the support of other parties, such as the Conservatives, when a vote is held later this month to officially appoint him council leader.
Rachel Taylor, the Labour MP for North Warwickshire and Bedworth, said she was “deeply concerned” that Reform was “proposing that an eighteen-year-old with no previous work experience should be running our county council”.
She called on the Tories to “vote this down”, adding: “I would ask them to reflect on whether they are willing to blindly rubber stamp what is clearly an inappropriate appointment.”
Last month Reform’s Rob Howard said it was with “much regret” that he was quitting as council leader, citing health challenges which he said prevented him from “carrying out the role to the level and standard that I would wish”.
His resignation came in the wake of chaos that followed Reform’s surge at the local elections, when it took hundreds of seats across England.
One newly-elected councillor resigned from the party just days after being elected.
Firing a parting shot as she left, Donna Edmunds also called for ousted Reform MP Rupert Lowe to establish a challenger party on the right of Reform and said Mr Farage “must never be prime minister”.
Another councillor, Wayne Titley, elected in Staffordshire, quit the council after just two weeks, following criticism over a Facebook post about small boats arriving in Britain.
And a Reform councillor’s failure to declare he worked for the council forced a by-election to be announced in Durham just a week after the local elections.
The chaos appeared to do little to dent Reform in the polls.
But a leading pollster recently suggested that support for the party has “topped out”, and that the momentum that was leading it to soar in the polls has ground to a halt.
Conservative peer Robert Hayward told The Independent that the results of recent council by-elections which Reform lost while defending seats, coupled with a small fall in the party’s national polling figures, suggest that the march of Mr Farage to Downing Street at the next general election could be facing a setback.
It came after business leaders and senior figures in the Labour Party urged Sir Keir Starmer to “stop obsessing” about the rise of Reform.
