At 33, Tom Cannon is one of the younger members of the ruling Conservative group at Kent County Council who harbours ambitions in both business and politics, when many see great change ahead for his party.

Local democracy reporter Simon Finlay caught up with him at his farm.

Tom Cannon has been having a stressful morning. A new nut dehusking machine has arrived from Sussex and his over-exuberant dog, Barney, inadvertently bit him on the nose in the car while chasing a ball.

Just another day on a Kentish cobnut farm, perhaps, but Mr Cannon is nothing if not relentlessly cheerful.

He has an easy charm and friendly smile as he recounts his morning's highlights.

The self-deprecating delivery cannot have hurt him on the doorstep when he picked up an unlikely seat for the Tories in the centre of the county town in 2021.

We meet on a grim winter's afternoon, with a swirling wind battering his family's hilltop farm, near West Peckham, between showers. Empty wooden crates lie stacked in the yard which overlooks a verdant expanse of rural west Kent. The odd worker ducks in and out of the barns.

"Pub?", he smiles. The Kentish Rifleman it is.

The restaurant is doing a roaring lunchtime trade, serving up roasts in front of an open log fire. The crowd is not so much old, as older; jumpered and well-heeled, certainly.

Thomas Ireland Blackburne Cannon was born 33 years ago at Maidstone Hospital to his accountant father and teacher mother, and grew up in Teston.

He attended Mereworth Primary School, thence to Bennett Memorial Diocesan School where he picked three good A levels and entrance to the University of East Anglia (UEA).

“I had a good childhood - fantastic. First class really, everything you could want. We had a lot of freedom. It was all very Famous Five and did a lot of those things as a boy.

“In some ways we were given a lot of responsibility to live an outdoors life and just get on with it.

"We were and are a close family. My school reports said I was conscientious but a bit stubborn, perhaps. I always had lots of friends and had no trouble in fitting in.”

If freedom gave Mr Cannon resilience and self-reliance, it shows today.

At UEA, he studied history and politics before completing an MA in modern British history.

It was there his political instincts began to stir, standing as a paper candidate in the Norwich south ward in the borough election. He came third.

"Everyone at uni was a Liberal Democrat at the time because of the tuition fees. University was the usual left-wing environment and everyone sort of goes with the peer group but it was at a time when the Tories had started to recover and New Labour was coming to an end. It was an interesting time."

(His father, Robert, was once a Lib Dem supporter but now sits as a Conservative at Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council.)

So what was the appeal of politics?

"When I was growing up there was always talk about politics at home. My parents encouraged us to have an opinion from a very early age and caring for the community was also important.

"Without sounding corny, it's because you want to change the world and you want to be good and you want to be kind."

He cites Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan as political inspirations.

Of Thatcher, he says: "Simply, she was inspirational and she changed the country for the better, in my view.

"I have a libertarian streak in me and I also liked her focus on self-reliance and enabling people to achieve the best they can. I'm not totally ideological and I understand that other people have their opinions, too.

"Margaret Thatcher certainly restored a lot of pride in Britain, if you look at the broad sweep of history in Britain in the 70s.

"I normally don't have a lot of time for US Presidents but I suppose that Ronald Reagan was very similar to Thatcher."

What of Donald Trump, then? "He is awful, to be honest. But what he has in his favour is the ability to appear to be listening to people who feel they have not been properly represented and he exploits that. I don't think he would be a friend.

"He does not respect the civility of most politics and is very divisive."

In 2021, he topped his Maidstone division ahead of the late Lib Dem Dan Daley. The area has not really been a happy hunting ground for the Tories until quite recently.

A shifting, fluid population has made it harder to call with low turnouts but dedicated, local work for residents can convert into support.

Mr Cannon managed to negotiate almost 20 new gritting salt bins ahead of winter, using allowances for community use and a bit of arm-twisting.

He adds: "I think I have got a good record and I'll stand (at the 2025 KCC elections) on that record of getting things done.

I hate to hear people doing Maidstone down - it's my hometown. I genuinely like the place and I like to be there

"The national picture is pretty terrible but if the electorate know their councillor has sorted out the gritting bins for them and helped restore some civic pride to the town centre as well as all the individual case work I do, I hope that will be enough."

Some pessimists in the Tory ranks worry the party could lose half its 60 seats at County Hall next time.

"You have to remember that for all the national woes, Kent is still a largely Conservative place. People might not want some of the more extreme policies of the other parties."

The Greens, currently enjoying a surge in popularity in Kent, still represent a home for the protest vote, he explains.

Mr Cannon lives in central Maidstone with his primary school teacher wife, Ellie.

Sipping on his pint, he says with a twinkle: "Ellie described me being like someone she teaches. By that, she means I don't like to be told off but I don't mind being part of the mischief that leads up to the telling off. Most men are probably a bit like that."

He runs the online and marketing side of the family business as a grower of Kentish cobnuts, which has been a success.

Roughway Farm sits up on a hill a rough, equal distance from the county town, Sevenoaks and Tonbridge.

"I'm a country boy at heart - I grew up there”, he says.

"And I hate to hear people doing Maidstone down - it's my hometown. I genuinely like the place and I like to be there."

In 2019, Mr Cannon became a Churchill Fellow, the living legacy of Winston Churchill. As a food producer, he was given the opportunity to travel through Turkey, China and the United States to see the operations of other nut farmers.

A subsequent trip to Australia was cut short by the pandemic and for a short time he was trapped, unable to get a flight home.

"There was talk about the pandemic before I went away and I was asked if I still wanted to go and I said yes.

"When I got out there, one by one, places started to shut. Honk Kong closed. Singapore closed. I must have booked about eight flights and one after another they were all cancelled.

"I was trapped in this weird limbo for about three weeks. I eventually got out via Doha and when I got back into the UK, the country was in lockdown which was very, very strange."

Mr Cannon has, in the past, harboured a desire to become an MP although he finds the thrill of running a successful business far more enticing.

Besides, he concedes, the job he would really, really want is currently taken by someone else.

Plus, he accepts an MP's life is tough and "your life's not your own".

But as one of the more senior backbenchers at Sessions House remarks: "Never a better time for Tom to get on the parliamentary candidates' list.

“There's going to be a huge clear-out of Tories at Westminster soon - plenty of opportunities to get in at the beginning of a new era."