Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party has put a teenager in charge of a major county council, overseeing hundreds of millions of pounds of public spending.
George Finch, 19, took over temporarily after the previous council leader, also a member of Reform, resigned just weeks after being elected.
Now he has been voted in as the leader of Warwickshire County Council, which has £1.5bn of assets and a budget of around £500m.
Before the vote, Labour MP for Birmingham Edgbaston, Preet Gill, criticised his position, 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.”
Reform is the largest party on the council, but it did not have an outright majority.
The BBC reported on Tuesday that Conservative members abstained from the final round of voting, leading to a tie with the Liberal Democrat nominee, Jerry Roodhouse, which was ultimately broken by the council’s chair, Reform’s Edward Harris.
As he voted to install Mr Finch as leader, Mr Harris said he was “disappointed and excited at the same time”.
“It [the tie] is not something I take lightly at all, and something I would rather not have happened,” he added.
Last month, Reform’s Rob Howard said it was with “much regret” that he was quitting as the council’s 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 the chaos that followed Reform’s success 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.
As she left, Donna Edmunds also called for the ousted Reform MP Rupert Lowe to establish a challenger party on the right of the party and said Mr Farage “must never be prime minister”.
Another councillor, Wayne Titley, who was elected in Staffordshire, quit after just two weeks in the wake of criticism over a Facebook post about small boats arriving in Britain.
And another Reform councillor’s failure to declare that he worked for the council forced a by-election to be announced in Durham just a week after the election.
While the chaotic scenes appeared to do little to dent Reform in the opinion polls, a leading pollster has now 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.
