How do you solve a problem like Lee? If you’re Rishi Sunak, then the answer is with the greatest reluctance. And extremely carefully. Lee Anderson is a man to be treated with kid gloves. To be loved back into a state of grace. It would be a push to call Lee a national treasure. But he is certainly the closest the Conservative party has to a local hero. An MP far more popular among fellow Tories than Rishi or any of his cabinet colleagues. Viewers tune into his GB News programme to be drip-fed divine truths. For the unsayable to be made flesh. Lee is their beating heart. How this came about is more of a mystery. Lee has been on quite the journey. He started life as a Labour councillor, making prejudiced remarks about Travellers before he jumped ship to the Tories. A party that would be more indulgent to his racism. And to the fact that he campaigned on behalf of Jeremy Corbyn in the 2017 general election.
Since then, Lee has made a career out of hypocrisy and stupidity. First, he lashed out at fellow MPs who took second jobs. MPs should be content to serve their constituents on their parliamentary salary, he insisted, moments before signing a £100k-a-year deal to present his own show on GB News. He then turned out at the launch of the Popular Conservatives as their voice on climate change. Burning coal was just fine, he told us. Because coal came from trees and trees were green. Some people even applauded this nonsense. But Lee doesn’t care if people think he’s stupid or racist. In fact, the more that people call him out, the more he likes it. It makes him feel good. Feeds his dysfunctionality. His overwhelming narcissism. More to the point, he binds all those supporters that the Tories like to pretend don’t exist but on whom they increasingly rely. So much so that the Conservative party chose to bung him an extra £10k a year. The only Brexit bonus anyone is likely to see.
And it was all going so well until Lee went openly racist on his home news channel on Friday night and declared that Sadiq Khan had been taken over by Islamists and that London was now being run by terrorists. Take a trip on the Northern line and your train will be driven by a suicide bomber. Every bus was on its own personal jihad. Now you could say that Lee was unlucky. That he happened to deliver his rant at a time when someone was actually watching. Who knows how many other hate crimes he has committed that have gone unremarked. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? But what had been heard could not now be unheard. And while there were plenty of Tories willing to attest that they had personally seen the London mayor take part in the 7 October terrorist attack, there were still a few who thought that maybe – just maybe – Anderson had gone too far this time.
Then up stepped brave Rish!. Or not. The prime minister was notably silent for 24 hours. Hoping that Lee would retract his statement. Say he had got it wrong this time. And that everyone could go back to being just a little bit racist this time. After all, racism-lite is the new acceptable face of Conservatism. But no. Still nothing. So Sunak was finally persuaded to withdraw the whip. With the clear understanding that Lee was still a figure of the divine. A human love pump. And was welcome back whenever he wanted. Rish! was no more coherent when he gave a series of interviews to local radio stations in Yorkshire on Monday morning. What Lee had said was wrong, he said. But it definitely wasn’t racist or Islamophobic. Er … Run that past us again. Lee had done something wrong, but the wrong thing wasn’t racist or Islamophobic. So what was wrong about it? That he was actually far too nice? Sunak couldn’t explain. Other than it was a category error. The Tory party had no problem with Islamophobia or racism, so therefore Lee couldn’t have said anything wrong. Apart from the wrong thing he had said. We were rapidly going round in ever decreasing circles. Sunak’s Tory party is having the same problem with Islamophobia as Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour had with antisemitism.
That provided the cue for almost everyone to go slightly mad. Paul Scully, a Tory junior minister who is normally considered one of the saner members of the government, gave an interview in which he insisted that words mattered. Lee should apologise. Only for him then to say there were no-go areas in Birmingham. The terrorists were in control there, too. It’s a wonder any of us secular types get through the day without being beheaded. Meanwhile, Lee himself was loving it. Thrilled to still be the centre of attention. So he gave a statement to GB News, which he insisted another presenter read out for him, that doubled down on his racism. Even as Lee didn’t speak, Sadiq was in talks to turn the M25 into a mosque. Any motorist who wasn’t radicalised would not be allowed into the centre of London. The Ulez charge was funding Hamas.
Not to be outdone, the always idiotic Jonathan Gullis accused the speaker of also radicalising most of his Stoke constituents. Suella Braverman went further. The whole of the establishment were now terrorists. When she looked around the cabinet table, she couldn’t be sure that one of her colleagues wasn’t about to blow up the room. Then there was the brown noser par excellence, Chris Philp. He, too, had counted hundreds of terrorists on his way to work. You could always spot a terrorist, he said. They were the ones who had nothing but contempt for the planning laws. The holy writ of the green belt. It’s possible that the Philpster is actually more stupid than 30p Lee. At least Lee doesn’t pretend to be anything but dim. Even Tom Tugendhat, who wouldn’t look out of place in a Keir Starmer cabinet, couldn’t bring himself to call out Lee. What he had said was wrong, but he couldn’t squeeze out the word Islamophobia. Come the early evening news, Rish! was at it again. The Tory party definitely, definitely didn’t have a problem with Islamophobia. It was just a total coincidence that everywhere he looked there were men with swords yelling ‘Allahu Akbar’. And that was just the leadership team of the Bank of England.