Two more Medway councillors defect to UKIP

As Medway UKIP have been promising for a while now, two more former Conservative councillors have defected to the party. One of these – Tom Mason – is not surprising in the slightest. The other – Vaughan Hewett – is rather more out of the blue.

Tom Mason is currently a Conservative councillor for Strood Rural, and had recently been unceremoniously deselected from the Conservative party for the upcoming election. After being a local councillor for 45 years, he didn’t take this too well, and made no secret of his outrage over the matter. After a few months of flirting with UKIP but not going public, he’s today revealed he’ll be standing for the party in the coming elections.

The case of Vaughan Hewett is rather more strange. Until last year, he was a Conservative councillor for Rainham North, and actually one of the more reasonable ones. He resigned from the party following a falling out with his fellow ward councillor David Carr. This was because Cllr Carr had made unpleasant comments about travellers that Cllr Hewett described as “something akin to the BNP”. After a year of sitting as an Independent Conservative, Cllr Hewett has now joined UKIP, and will also fight his seat in the coming elections.

Is this the last of the UKIP defections in Medway, or do the party have one or two more surprises up their sleeves?

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