Who is the worst man in Britain? According to the Daily Mirror, it’s the 56-year-old former coal miner and Tory MP Lee Anderson, who clinched the award a year ago after criticising England’s footballers for ‘taking the knee’. How did Anderson, who this week was appointed Deputy Chairman of the Tory party, respond to the accolade? ‘I immediately rang my parents to thank them for all their support. It’s the first time anyone from my family has been voted the worst man in Britain, so I tried to win it two years on the trot.’
Since his election in December 2019, Anderson has emerged as the pugnacious ambassador for the Red Wall intake of Conservative MPs. He is, like his Ashfield constituency, a Tory convert, having served as a Labour councillor until a year before his election. While many well-heeled Tories shy away from cost-of-living issues, Anderson relishes the debate, arguing that anyone earning over £30,000 but using food banks ‘must have a budgeting problem’. He won the nickname ‘30p Lee’ after he claimed that £50 could be used to produce 172 meals and feed a family of five for a week.
We meet a few days before his appointment, when Anderson is still a backbencher. In a parliament increasingly dominated by middle-class professionals, Anderson says he can speak plainly about food banks and other issues, given his own life experience. ‘I can say it because I was a single parent for 17 years with two boys. I struggled. I know what it’s like to put your last fiver in the gas meter. I know what it’s like to have to sell your car because you can’t afford to run it – so I’ll take no lectures from anybody about being hard up and struggling for survival.’
He spent a decade working at the Citizens Advice Bureau, where he says he saw one family claim the equivalent of £70,000 in benefits. He suggests that an ignorance of the realities of social security is why so few Tories are unwilling to engage on the subject now. ‘They don’t know. I went to the DWP spads [special advisers] to tell them how much Universal Credit a family could get by only working a few hours. They hadn’t got a clue.’
‘Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed. 100 per cent success rate’
Why then have successive Conservative governments done so little to alter the existing system since Iain Duncan Smith’s tenure? ‘Too scared, because it’s like picking on poor people, isn’t it? When, actually, most working-class people would agree with me.’ Anderson is scornful of the backlash he receives for such remarks. ‘If I say something that is supposedly outrageous in that place [the Commons], I get back to Ashfield on a Thursday, people will come out the shops and say, “You say what I’m thinking.”’
He has become a bit of a star in right-wing Tory circles. He has undertaken a dozen engagements in the past year – ‘last week I did Halifax, this week I’m in Taunton’ – and he boasts about his booked-up diary for the next two months. ‘I’ve done Bournemouth, I’ve done Chipping Norton. I’ve done loads and I’m even booked up for Christmas now. The membership like that red-to-blue story, that working-class Tory story. It’s the [party] membership that’s asking me to go. ‘Maybe some of my colleagues think I’m a little bit too divisive,’ he continues. ‘But I’m of the mind that half the population will hate you, whatever colour you wear.’
He joined the Tory party in early 2018 after a council meeting at which he was confronted by a Momentum activist. ‘One of the Momentum members said to me, “Have you ever read the works of Karl Marx?” Of course I’ve not, nobody reads that rubbish. So, his response was, go and join the Tory party. So I said, do you know what, I’m going to do that – and I did. I joined the Tory party about a month later and 18 months later I was that man’s MP, so that’s how quick it happened. The Labour party sometimes gives good career advice.’ Not all in his family agreed with the decision: ‘My youngest son cried when I joined the Tory party, that was the toughest part.’
Is this still the same Tory party that won in 2019? He pauses: ‘What a question. Er, well, it’s the same party. Have we got the same direction? I hope so.’ He points to Britain leaving the European Union but adds ‘there’s still work to do’, and raises the issue of the small boats crisis. ‘It goes back to immigration in the Red Wall, or it does for me.’ His promotion comes just a few weeks before Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, unveils her new ‘Stop the Boats Bill’ to halt migrant crossings. Anderson is a vocal critic of the failure to deal with the issue. ‘For some reason, in this place, saying the obvious – they just call it populist. It’s our job to represent opinions of people in our country. If people are angry about small boats, then we should be angry.’
He visited Calais last month, where he says new migrants, eager to reach Britain, were referring to the UK as ‘El Dorado’. ‘They are seeing a country where the streets are paved with gold – where, once you land, they are not in that manky little fucking scruffy tent. They are going to be in a four-star hotel! And they know that Serco is buying up houses everywhere, to put them in for the next five years. Why wouldn’t you come?’ His solution? ‘I’d send them straight back the same day. I’d put them on a Royal Navy frigate or whatever and sail it to Calais, have a standoff. And they’d just stop coming.’
Anderson is regarded by some of his colleagues as a bellwether within the party. One MP says they knew the game was up for Boris Johnson last July when Anderson withdrew his support for the Prime Minister. ‘I was gutted for Boris because I really like the man,’ he says. ‘It was the Pincher thing for me. The fact that it weren’t dealt with swiftly enough’. Anderson says he would have been haunted if he did not act over the scandal. Having backed Truss in the July contest and then Johnson again initially in October, Anderson is nevertheless happy that Sunak has brought ‘serious’ back to politics. He praises the Prime Minister for ‘two big bones he’s thrown to us’: the Cumbrian coal mine and a pledge that those who arrive here illegally cannot claim asylum. Before his new appointment, he was also planning a campaign on food poverty and the restoration of home economics to the school curriculum.
Another topic of concern is crime: would Anderson support the return of the death penalty? ‘Yes. Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed. You know that, don’t you? 100 per cent success rate.’ He pauses. ‘Now I’d be very careful on that one because you’ll get the certain groups saying: “You can never prove it.” Well, you can prove it if they have videoed it and are on camera – like the Lee Rigby killers. I mean: they should have gone, same week. I don’t want to pay for these people.’ He has his own experiences with crime to share, having received ‘a couple of death threats’ which are being investigated by the police, and an attempt at blackmail, too. ‘I don’t know what they’re blackmailing me over, I just passed it straight to the police.’
In public, he is best known for scrapping with anti-Brexit campaigners and railing against illegal migrants. But colleagues privately praise his warmth, good humour and love of pranks. One fellow MP recalls receiving a phone call requesting an urgent meeting at the Treasury with the then chancellor Rishi Sunak. Eagerly, they hurried over and demanded to speak to him, only to be told that not only was Sunak not at the meeting, but that he was not even in the capital at the time. A gleeful Anderson greeted the MP on their return to parliament. He is also an ardent Nottingham Forest fan and calls John Robertson ‘a genius’ and ‘absolutely [the] best player ever’. Currently he is reading a biography of Steve Ward, the one-time oldest professional boxer in the world. In his maiden speech he praised D.H. Lawrence, local Notts son, whose book Lady Chatterley’s Lover he said he had read several times.
What does Anderson wish others knew about him? ‘It’s that when I speak, I’m speaking from a position of strength – when I talk about food banks or poverty, or whatever. I’ve been piss-poor. I’ve had two kids on my own. I’ve had no money. And when they talk about the NHS – it saved my wife’s life, it saved my life. I know what I’m talking about. Deprived areas? There is nowhere more deprived than the street I was brought up on. Don’t dictate to me that I’m some toffee-nosed Tory that’s been educated at Eton. All the social problems we’ve got – I’ve lived through them and helped people with them.’
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