Liz Truss launched her Popular Conservatism movement — catchily dubbed PopCon — just over a month ago. Taking aim at ‘left wing extremists’, Truss hit out at colleagues more interested in pursuing policies popular at ‘London dinner parties’ and explained that her new group would champion true Tory values. But it wasn’t just lefties that didn’t fare well. Before PopCon had even launched, event organisers ousted Simon Clarke MP from the speaker line-up after he called for Rishi Sunak to go.
Could Lee Anderson be next? The former deputy chairman of the Conservative party was one of PopCon’s star speakers. Cracking jokes about how he and his fellow speaker Jacob Rees-Mogg were both from estates, the ex-Tory also landed some rather more discreet blows on Sunak over the government’s net zero approach. But despite the keynote speaker heaping praise on Truss’s movement and bolstering her call for a return to proper Conservative values, there are questions about Anderson’s future in the group. Now that he has defected to Reform, can he really stay?
Mr S has contacted Truss’s spokesperson who says that the former prime minister is yet to make a public statement on the issue. But perhaps the matter isn’t quite so clear cut. Reform founder Nigel Farage was, after all, in attendance at Truss’s PopCon launch — albeit, he says, in his capacity as a GB News journalist. And more recently, Truss said on her visit to the US that Farage should join the Tory party to ‘help turn our country around’. It remains to be seen whether an olive branch to Anderson will be ruled out…
Comments