Last week, the Conservative party deputy chairman and GB News presenter Lee Anderson was interviewed by his fellow presenter Nigel Farage on Farage’s GB News show. Or rather it was not really an interview but a sort of ideological pastiche, with Farage paying lip-service to a journalistic role while telegraphing his political support for his colleague. What occasioned this meeting of like minds was the fact that Anderson had made one of his by now familiar “controversial” statements. He had told the Daily Express that if asylum seekers didn’t want to stay on the Bibby Stockholm barge in Portland harbour, they could “fuck off back to France”. Did he regret his use of language, asked Farage, with a knowing smile? “No!” insisted Anderson from his home in Nottinghamshire. He was dressed in a white T-shirt, with his tattoos showing on his biceps, all gruff attitude and simmering menace, as if auditioning for a local amdram production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Unrepentant, he launched into an attack on lefty lawyers, charities and human rights campaigners, all of whom made him “sick”.
It was a classic aggressive performance from the former coalminer, of the kind that has made his growing reputation. Back in February, Anderson was in the news for calling for the restoration of the death penalty. Before that, he’d made headlines by claiming that people who used food banks didn’t know how to budget, and that meals could be made for 30p – which led to critics nicknaming him “30p Lee”. In 2021, during the delayed Euro 2020 tournament, he announced that he would not watch the England football team in protest at their taking the knee before matches. He also described Travellers as thieves, and lobbied for a policy of processing asylum seekers in the Falkland Islands. All of which caused the raising of a few eyebrows when Anderson was made a deputy chairman earlier this year. How could Rishi Sunak, the consummate technocrat, renowned for his beaming diplomacy, want someone as blunt and provocative as Anderson within his tent? Many observers saw it as a cynical piece of politicking, recruiting an attack dog to galvanise red-wall support while maintaining a safe distance – after all, deputy chairman is a largely decorative role, shared with four other appointees. Since then, Sunak’s government has seemed to finesse the art of detaching itself from Anderson’s choice of words while endorsing his views. A typical example was justice secretary Alex Chalk who, when asked about Anderson’s comments regarding asylum seekers in Portland, admitted that his language was “salty” but maintained that his “indignation is well placed”, and rejected the idea that Anderson was guilty of bigotry. Tim Bale is professor of politics at London’s Queen Mary University and an expert on the modern Conservative party. How does he think Anderson’s bristling delivery goes down with Tory supporters? “It’s a double-edged sword,” he says. “Clearly, it appeals to some who like that populist ‘tell-it-like-it-is’ persona, but on the other hand it will really grate with traditional, more moderate Conservatives who don’t appreciate bad language and the coarseness of his approach.” Bale suspects that the Tory party number-crunchers have worked out that they can afford to alienate the traditionalists in safe seats in exchange for holding on to the “red-wall” voters to whom they believe Anderson’s abrasive style speaks. Bale questions this line of thinking. “There’s an awful lot of stereotyping of working-class, culturally conservative voters going on in the Tory party. If they think that somebody using the F-word is going to trump people’s anger about mortgages and the health service, they’ve got another think coming.” One of Anderson’s repeated points is that the kinds of opinions that shock metropolitan liberals are commonplace in his constituency, Ashfield in Nottinghamshire. Outside Morrisons in Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Sarah Burgess is pushing a trolley-load of food, with a copy of the Daily Mail folded on top. What does she think of Anderson? “All he’s interested in is causing division,” she says. “I think it’s embarrassing that he’s a member of parliament.” Her sentiments are echoed a few minutes later by Elaine Huckerby, who suggests that Anderson is “out for his own ends. I think he’s intentionally controversial and he’s getting a lot of money from various sources for doing that. It’s shocking that he’s an MP.” That’s not to say theirs is the majority view. Most people I speak to don’t know who Anderson is. In Andrews Barber Shop on Station Street, I ask several men gathered waiting for a haircut what they think about their MP. “Who?” comes the collective reply.
But he does have some passionate supporters. Audrey and Trevor Evans tell me that they “agree with everything he says”. They believe the country is in a terrible state, and it’s “shameful what this government has done”. I point out that Anderson is deputy chairman of the party that is in control of the government. This doesn’t appear to cause any cognitive dissonance. They tell me that they only voted Conservative to get the UK out of Europe and to stop illegal immigrants. They now support the Reform party, which used to be the Brexit party. “Politicians are being directed by major shadowy organisations,” says Trevor. “We’ve looked under the bonnet,” he adds, enigmatically, “and we’re not conspiracy theorists.” So Anderson’s most devout supporters in Ashfield are not even Tory voters. In a way, they mirror the man himself. He told Farage that the government had “failed” on small boats. Paul Goodman, editor of Conservative Home, thinks Anderson’s apparent autonomy marks a step away from the control and unity of the “on message” politics exemplified by today’s Labour party. “Maybe we are in a different age where voters want lots of authentic voices,” he says, “even if those voices don’t fully agree with each other.” The most popular support offered in Ashfield is for his opinion that the small boats should be stopped and migrants – or refugees – sent back. It remains an emotive issue for many, despite or perhaps because of the government’s inability to stem the crossings. The constituency, of which Kirkby forms a part, used to contain a number of collieries and was at the heart of coalmining in the county. Like his father before him, Anderson left school to go down a pit at a time when his politics were formed, in his own words, by “[Arthur] Scargill, [Dennis] Skinner and Tony Benn.” Anderson was a Labour party man, who, when coalmining began to collapse, worked for a local Citizens Advice bureau and became a Labour councillor, and thereafter a case-worker for the then Labour MP for Ashfield, Gloria De Piero. By then he’d long been a father of two sons, both of whom lived with him after he split from their mother when the boys were infants. “He was always socially conservative,” recalls a former Labour party insider from the area who knew him, “but that isn’t unusual in this part of the world. Nobody knocked on doors more than him. He was really active.” By his own telling, what drove him out of the party was the Corbynite revolution that put the Momentum faction in control of the local council. The local party, for whom he worked, was moderate, but the council was more to the left, leaving him somewhat embattled. “They were horrible to him,” says the former Labour insider. “And he was horrible back.” The leader of the district council at the time, Cheryl Butler, says it was the other way round. “He is not a very nice person at all,” she says. According to her, he tried to become leader when he first became councillor but couldn’t get the support, and thereafter made Butler’s life “very difficult”. “He didn’t want to be associated with Labour,” she says. “We heard that he was speaking to the opposition, for example Ben Bradley [now MP for neighbouring Mansfield].” Bradley has confirmed that Anderson used to brief him when he was a Tory district councillor. “He’d give me all the gossip in advance of the meetings and tell me what difficult questions to ask,” he told the BBC. In 2018, Anderson was turned down when he reapplied to be a Labour councillor, partly for his views on equality and diversity. “He was misogynistic,” says Butler. “In his interview, he said that a woman’s place was at home in the kitchen with the children.”
Shortly after, he went to work for Bradley and became a Tory councillor before gaining the nomination to be the candidate for Ashfield in 2019. That move left one of his staunch centrist supporters in Labour feeling “surprised and betrayed”. He won the seat from Labour after a local independent split the vote. During the campaign, Anderson was caught by the journalist Michael Crick getting a friend to pretend on a doorstep that he didn’t know him but supported him. When questioned about this by a BBC reporter, he refused to answer and instead repeatedly asked the reporter if she had ever lied. Ever since, Anderson has seemed set on drawing as much attention to himself as he can. From a distance, it can look a lot like either narcissism or as if he has become the naughty plaything of the Tory party, useful for saying the unsayable but not housetrained enough to be given a proper job. The former Labour insider, who has known him for a while, says he’s a much brighter man than he’s given credit for, but that in recent years “he’s become a caricature of himself”, firing off opinions – like the 30p meals – that he would never have dreamed of saying, or believing, when he was in Labour. In doing so, he has become a loudmouth maverick who won Conservative Home’s backbencher of the year award last year. He not only challenges the classical image of a Tory – he’s hardly Norman St John-Stevas, or even Jacob Rees-Mogg – but also raises awkward questions for Labour: what are they going to do about illegal migrants?
Some observers even suggest that Keir Starmer needs to confront the working-class populism that Anderson embodies. Tim Bale thinks this would be unwise: “There’s no point giving him the oxygen of publicity that he is seeking. It’s much better that Labour focuses on what really decides elections, which is not the sweary stuff but ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’” As the next election grows closer, we can expect to hear yet more from Anderson, more divisive, more emotive, more accusatory, more extreme. Sunak presumably hopes he will be the rough diamond who will help secure the red wall and with it an unlikely electoral victory. But even if that were possible, what would be the cost? What kind of Tory party will be left if figures such as Anderson are silently encouraged? Sunak may think he’s cleverly containing and exploiting the forces of populism, but then conservatives in America once believed they could use Donald Trump for their own ends. Patronising bullies, as history show us, is a dangerous game.