'It's like driving over the surface of Mars the potholes are so bad'

Like many Wiganers, Rober Kenyon grew up in a staunchly Labour-supporting family, 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.

READ MORE: Teenager dies after horrific incident on off-road track

“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