From the outside, political parties appear to the public as an undifferentiated mass of eccentrics who materialise once every few years; all coloured rosettes, clipboards, and strained earnestness before an unenthused crowd.

Members tend to be drawn from a particular class, and the disaffected public rightly detect this uniformity. But if you’re lucky enough to see the guts of a party at work over time, the conflict between their members is impossible not to notice.

In the last two weeks, nine Tories on Sevenoaks District Council – a long-time Conservative stronghold – resigned en masse in a move which risked handing control to their opposition, the Liberal Democrats.

As is often the case in local government, one hears that the dividing line of this conflict is a personal one, of ousted former council leader Cllr Julia Thornton seeking vengeance against successor, Cllr Roddy Hogarth, and opposing his perceived management style.

New claims this week that the defectors may rejoin if Cllr Hogarth steps down further reveal the paucity of political content in this schism. The Left in general, and Labour in particular, has a well-earned reputation for factional warfare.

Blairites, Brownites, soft-left, old right, Corbynites – Labour’s fault-lines are more well-known than those in other parties. These often play themselves out at a local level more readily than with the Tories, or even Greens or Lib Dems.

Plenty of Labour councillors in Kent and across the country have jumped ship in the past year or so over their party’s position on Israel and Palestine or the benefits system – it’s much harder to find examples of local Tories who’ve bailed because of disagreements with the national party.

But within Labour, the time-honoured tradition of internecine fisticuffs seems to be in decline. Morgan Jones described in the New Statesman this week the recent conference of Progressive Britain – a rebranding of Progress, formerly the tip of the spear of Blairism.

“It didn’t used to be like this: where are the people with blood on their teeth, filled with messianic belief and ruthless purpose? Did the loss of the Labour Left mean a loss of purpose for Labour’s progressives, revealing a thinner politics than previously thought?” she wrote.

Factions can only exist in tension with one another, and the exodus of the Labour left – and wider membership - under the Starmer hegemony is neutering their historical foes too.

Conflicts within parties shape the political landscape at least as much as the apparent struggle between them…

While Conservative intra-party warfare certainly exists, currently in the form of Jenrick loyalists waiting for Kemi Badenoch to slip up, one assumes the combatants are going about their business with an impotence mirroring that of their national party.

No political organisation of a decent size can be free of factionalism, and it isn’t in itself a bad thing.

In parties that actually have a relationship of representation to a large social constituency, factions seeking to steer the party further towards one section or another of that base are normal and healthy, and the tension between them is a key factor in the formulation of policy.

With Labour and the Tories no longer credibly claiming any representative relationship with the public beyond the purely formal one of their parliamentary seats, splits within the minor parties become all the more interesting and important.

Who will the Green Party listen to more? Their radical, metropolitan activist base, or the moderate, wealthy countryside-dwellers who increasingly vote for them locally?

Will Reform’s leaders lean into the disaffected Thatcherite instincts of much of the mainstream Right, or the more blended positions of an emergent young Right preoccupied with immigration and culture above all else?

These conflicts within parties shape the political landscape at least as much as the apparent struggle between them.

There are plenty of ways to stay in the know when it comes to politics in Kent and Medway.

For more from Simon Finlay and the local democracy team, you can sign up to the Kent Politics Briefing newsletter, which arrives in inboxes every Friday.

You can also listen to our Kent Politics Podcast. This week’s episode welcomes former KCC leader Roger Gough, who opens up about the Tories’ devastating loss to Reform.

You can listen to the podcast at IM Listening, or download it from Apple Podcasts, Spotify and TuneIn – just search for Kent Politics Podcast. New episodes are available every Friday.

And you can watch the KMTV Kent Politics Show every Friday at 5pm on Freeview channel 7 and Virgin Media channel 159.