Dogs bark, cows moo and Lee Anderson shoots his mouth off. The firecracker that is the Tory deputy party chairman took to the ConservativeHome stage on the Tory conference fringe this afternoon, and he certainly didn’t hold back.
Speaking to Anand Menon, director of the think tank UK in a Changing Europe, the plain-talking Anderson fired off his thoughts on a number of topics, ranging from how he went from Labour to Tory and from hating to loving Margaret Thatcher, to his famous moniker ‘30p Lee’.
Asked whether he would ever consider rejoining the Labour party, Anderson branded it a ‘ridiculous question’. He didn’t stop there though: ‘The working classes for the Labour party – we were useful idiots.’ Later on, he added, ‘None of them have done a decent day’s work in their lives, not one of them.’ A one-time Labour councillor, Anderson recalled how his colleagues had wanted to open a book of condolences to the Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro when he died in 2016. ‘I think the word that you use for these people is “nutters”.’
In unsurprising news, the GB News host said he agreed with the Home Secretary that ‘multiculturalism had failed’ but heaped praise on leader Rishi Sunak too for ‘sacrificing a nice, peaceful, rich life to come and put up with all this nonsense that he puts up with in this place and all these idiots all the time.’ Noble stuff Lee. Admonishing those MPs who will ‘say and do anything’ to get into power, he mused aloud that ‘a dictator is a good idea – if they’re a good dictator. But there’s no good dictators are there?’ Quite…
On HS2, he was blunt, branding the high speed rail network ‘a load of nonsense’. Jokingly, he then asked the audience ‘Is there anyone from Bradford here?’ before quipping to roars of laughter from the audience, ‘Would you want to get there any quicker?’ He had harsh words for benefits claimants too, telling them to ‘just crack on and get on with it. Stop whinging.’ Expanding onto the issue of food poverty, on which he claimed to be ‘speaking from a position of strength’, he said ‘We didn’t go on Facebook or TikTok and moan and say “I’ve got no food”, because my mum and dad’s philosophy was simple: they’re our kids and we’ll feed them.’
Addressing the cost of living more broadly, Anderson didn’t mince his words. ‘This is not an impoverished island. This is a wealthy country and the opportunities here are limitless in the UK,’ he said. ‘If you want something, you can go and get it. You need to get off your arse and go and get it for yourself.’
Quizzed about last week’s debacle featuring his GB News colleague Dan Wooton and Laurence Fox, Anderson claimed not to have seen the footage of them talking lewdly about the journalist Ava Evans because he was on holiday in Spain at the time. However, he called their actions ‘wrong’. Ever the showman, Anderson acknowledged that he knew he was ‘quite divisive’, but said it was all part of doing his job properly as an MP. ‘If I can’t say it, then you’ve not got a voice. So I’ll carry on being divisive.’
Does he know any other way?
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