Lee Anderson: from Labour councillor to Labour wind-up merchant

Lee Anderson, the former miner turned MP for Ashfield, has caused more controversy in his four-and-a-bit years in parliament than most of the 2019 intake combined.

Before he was even elected, Labour was calling for him to be sacked, after he suggested nuisance social housing tenants should be evicted into tents and made to pick vegetables.

But winding up Labour is one of Anderson’s greatest talents. He learned exactly which buttons to press, having served as office manager to Ashfield’s last Labour MP, Gloria De Piero, and sat as a Labour councillor on Ashfield district council.

His ability to make Labour look prissy, and to say the unsayable in his broad Nottinghamshire yowl, was exactly why he was so prized by the Conservatives as a one-man unmoderated comments section.

“Fuck off back to France,” he told asylum seekers complaining about their accommodation on the Bibby Stockholm barge.

In Anderson’s world, foreign prisoners are living it up in “comfy cells”, only avoiding deportation because of “lefty lawyers”.

He once responded to a Labour MP expressing concerns about the prejudice faced by Gypsies and Travellers by saying that the Travellers in his constituency were less likely to “flog” you lucky heather than “be seen leaving your garden shed at 3 o’clock in the morning, probably with your lawnmower and half of your tools”.

For the Tories he was a useful counterpart to Rishi Sunak, with his £180 “smart mug”, and extravagantly rich wife. They believed he could woo the kind of voters who were turned off by Sunak’s expensive shoes and Jacob Rees-Mogg’s accent. They liked him showing his tattooed arms on GB News – proof, they hoped, that the party of pinstripes and privilege was now also the home of the inked-up working man.

That’s how he rose to become party vice-chair last February, just days after giving an interview in which he went decidedly off-piste and expressed his support for the death penalty.

The Conservatives had no plans to bring back executions, but would it be so bad for them if Anderson reached the not insubstantial minority of the electorate who remain in favour of the ultimate punishment?

Similarly, when Anderson announced in 2021 that he would be boycotting the England football team in protest at their taking the knee before matches, his party left him to his own devices, reasoning that large swathes of the population probably shared his view.

His views on women leave much to be desired. Cheryl Butler, the Labour leader of Ashfield council during Anderson’s tenure, told the Observer he was turned down in 2018 when he reapplied to be a Labour councillor, partly for his views on equality and diversity.

“He was misogynistic,” Butler said. “In his interview, he said that a woman’s place was at home in the kitchen with the children.”

Such opinions might have prompted his exit from Labour, but they were arguably viewed as a plus point for many in the Conservatives.

But on Saturday, Anderson finally went too far, after he told GB News that the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, had “given our capital city away to his mates”.

“I don’t actually believe that the Islamists have got control of our country, but what I do believe is they’ve got control of Khan, and they’ve got control of London,” he said.

He refused to resign, and so had the whip withdrawn. But will he now be expelled from the party, making him unable to stand for the Conservatives in the next general election, whenever that may be? Don’t be so sure.

Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, has left the door open for his return. Anderson’s words were “not acceptable”, said Dowden. But, he added: “Of course, if he apologises, we’d look at the nature of that and make a determination at that point. But that’s a matter for the chief whip.”