THIS is not how things are supposed to be. Thomas Kerr, 21, grew up in a high rise in one of the most deprived parts of Glasgow. Both his parents were drug addicts. From the age of six, it was Thomas who was looking after his mum rather than the other way around. It was a hard life; sometimes there was no proper food in the house, often there was no money. And yet who did he have a picture of hanging on his bedroom wall? Margaret Thatcher, because Thomas Kerr is a Conservative.

In fact, he’s more than that. Five months ago, the young PR student from Cranhill achieved what once looked impossible when he was elected Conservative councillor for Shettleston. The achievement made him part of the Tory surge of the summer and it’s still happening. Earlier this week, the Conservatives won a by-election in Aberdeenshire after adding 12 per cent to their vote. In a country where many still see the Tories as pariahs – thanks mainly to the woman whose picture Thomas had on his bedroom wall – the surge, it would seem, has not gone away.

Five months on from his victory, Kerr is now the deputy leader of the Tory group in Glasgow and I’ve come to spend the afternoon with him to find out how he’s getting on in an area that used to belong to Labour. Thomas genuinely believes Tory solutions can work for the area he grew up in. But can they really?

We’re starting our tour on Shettleston Road and right away we get a clear idea of the kind of the problems the area faces. At the bus-stop, 37-year-old Lisa Laird tells us what it’s like to live round here. The knife crime is really bad, she says. And the violence, the dog mess, and the litter. I ask her what the positives are. “I don’t think I could really give you a positive,” she says. Lisa also reveals that she has only ever voted once in her life, which was in 2014, for Scottish independence.

Which makes her reaction to Thomas Kerr interesting. Lisa, and the other locals at the bus-stop, still hate Thatcher, but they love the idea of change and don’t mind if it comes in the form of a Tory. They also like the idea that Thomas is a local lad; he knows what they’ve been through because he has been through it himself.

Thomas was born in 1996 – a full six years after Thatcher left office – and grew up in a council flat in Cranhill. His dad left when he was young and his mum struggled to cope. Both his parents were heroin addicts and from a very young age Thomas was the carer rather than the cared-for.

“Mum had been on heroin just before I was born,” says Kerr, “so I grew up with that. She was on benefits and still is, so it was hard – there were microwave burgers on the table nearly every day, and I had to look after mum and it was tough when you’re six, seven years old.”

At one point, Thomas moved in with his auntie; another time, he lived with his grandparents. They were traditional Labour voters and Kerr thinks that, in a way, being a Conservative was a way for him to rebel. Instead of drinking or doing drugs, he hero-worshipped Thatcher. “Beforehand, when you were working class, you went into the mines, or the shipyards,” he says. “She opened up a big opportunity for working class people to say well, actually, if you want to be something, then go and do it. Her impact has changed this country for the better.”

However, Kerr knows that for him personally, it could have gone the other way and he might have ended up on drugs, like his parents. “It would have been easy with the background I had to say ‘bugger it’, I’m going to do nothing.” He says he has never tried drugs but has been at parties where drugs were around and it winds him up. “It frustrates and annoys me and I think, get a grip, this isn’t normal, it’s wasting your life away.”

But he also has no patience with people saying we should get tough on drugs. “Growing up where I grew up and seeing what I’ve seen, you see life in a different aspect,” he says. “You think: it’s all right for somebody who’s posh to say ‘drugs are bad’ but no wonder people in Cranhill are turning to drugs because they don’t feel like they’ve got any hope or inspiration to do anything with their life. Come to one of these areas and see why people are using drugs.”

Kerr has thought long and hard about the best ways to tackle the problem, based on what he’s seen in his own family, and believes in legalising cannabis, so people can use it relatively safely, and shutting down the methadone programme, even though his mum is still on it.

“She was on methadone when I was young as well,” he says, “but she would get the methadone in bags and give it to someone for money and then she would go and get heroin. Methadone is like taking an addict on one drug and putting them on another.”

Kerr also believes that it wasn’t methadone that helped his mother but rehab. “The big changing point in her life was seven years ago when she had my little sister. It kind of gave her a kick up the arse and she said: I need to get myself together and she went into rehab. That was also when I decided to go into politics because I wanted to give her something to look up to.”

At first, Kerr drifted to the Labour party before realising he was more aligned with the Tories. We take a walk round to Eastbank Academy, where Thomas went to school, and he tells me how his political views were developing when he was a pupil there.

“The way people feel about Thatcher, that’s the way I feel about Tony Blair - that’s who I grew up with, those were the baddies,” he says. “Blair and Brown were the people who were in charge. The same is happening to Sturgeon – the biggest shock to me during the last election campaign was how many people said to me ‘that bloody woman’.”

Kerr says the problem, as far as many people in Shettleston are concerned, is that Labour and then the SNP did nothing for the area for years. He shows me some of the local shops, the empty units, the decay, and the litter. It’s lunchtime at the school and a pupil dumps the lid off his takeaway meal onto the ground without a second thought. “People think because you stay in the east end, it doesn’t matter,” says Kerr.

Kerr does know there’s a limit to what he can do as a councillor, but he’s already asked the local businesses what they would like to see happen. He also supports some old-fashioned Tory answers – local firms are paying too much tax he says and he would bring tax down so they have more money to invest in their businesses.

What does surprise Kerr is that, to some extent, his old-school Tory beliefs seem to have got through in his area, leading to his election as a councillor in the local elections in May. I ask him why he thinks it happened.

“There are three reasons,” he says. “One was because of Nicola Sturgeon calling for a second referendum; people really did not want it. Second, was because of Labour – in the east end of Glasgow Labour’s been in charge for years but people were looking at them and asking: what have you actually done? And the last reason was because I was local.” I ask him if he thinks the traditional Orange vote in the east end was a factor and he says no. “I’m not saying there’s not a big Orange vote, but I had nothing to do with that kind of thing.”

In fact, Thomas’s dad was an Orangeman, but he left the home when Thomas was young and their relationship was difficult. As we walk back along Shettleston Road, we talk about his dad and it’s the one time he gets really emotional and has to wipe away a tear.

“I had an on-off relationship with him,” he says. “He passed away in 2016; he had just got himself fixed out and that was quite hard for me. He was 43; the years of drugs had got to him. He had been on heroin as well.”

Kerr says it was his grandparents who gave him his values, and, despite the problems he and his family have faced, he says he is grateful for his upbringing. He is studying for his degree but has taken a year out to concentrate on his council work. He is also enjoying the idea that he’s breaking down the old stereotype that you have to be posh to be Tory. When he stood in the Scottish parliamentary election in 2016, people in Shettleston were telling him to f**k off. Now they’re telling him he’s got their vote.