Lee Anderson isn’t one to shy away from controversy and his speech on Monday evening at a fringe event at Tory conference certainly did not disappoint. The party’s deputy chairman addressed a packed out room at a Manchester club. While recounting his life story, Anderson couldn’t resist taking a pop at Guardian journalists, Diane Abbott and, er, Margaret Thatcher. A rather brave move in a room full of Tories…
Anderson said being voted ‘the worst man in Britain’ by the Mirror was the ‘greatest honour’ of his life. ‘Funnily enough, that year was a very close competition. I’d just beat Prince Andrew to it. Did you get that, Guardian?’
‘I was brought up on a strict political diet of Skinner, Scargill and Tony Benn,’ Anderson continued. ‘We hated Maggie with a passion!’
She came along and all of a sudden our industry started closing down a bit, started closing… That was something that I find very difficult to forgive Maggie and the Tory party for.
Anderson wasn’t alone with his less-than-rosy memories of the Margaret Thatcher era. ‘We learned rhymes about Thatcher and how we wanted her to die in the playground at school,’ Miriam Cates MP chipped in after Anderson’s speech. Mr S isn’t sure the crowd was quite prepared to hear about all that Thatcher bashing…
On his ‘road to Damascus’ moment, Anderson explained that he saw the light during a constituency visit. When working for the Labour MP Gloria De Piero, he was trying to persuade a Conservative voter to change their mind, when he realised his had been changed instead.
‘I went back to Gloria and she said: “Which way is he voting?” I said, “Tory. I don’t blame him.”’
The deputy chairman hadn’t finished blasting the Labour party though:
They bang on about illegal immigration all the time… That we’re not caring and compassionate and welcoming country, and that’s nonsense because we are… I went to the camps with the Home Affairs Select Committee, which is a cross-party committee. Now, Diane Abbott was supposed to come, but she went to the wrong station in the morning. She never got there — so that was a bonus.
Ouch. Anderson went on:
This is part of the what the New Conservatives believe in. It’s about when people come to this country in genuine need of refuge… It winds me up when we see the illegals coming over, taking advantage of our system.
Punchy stuff. Anderson’s night didn’t end there though. Mr S spotted the MP zipping off to a drinks reception hosted by his other employer, GB News. It was the place to be: he joined Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Liz Truss and even Priti Patel — who didn’t need much convincing to jump on stage and lead the crowd in a drunken rendition of Robbie Williams’s Angels. Who says the Tories don’t know how to have a good time…
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