‘If it feels like it’s fraying around the edges, that’s because it is’ - Sunak on notice, a government rapidly falling apart, and how everything went wrong... again.
Promoting Lee Anderson to the role of Conservative Party deputy chair in January 2023 was one of the dumbest things Rishi Sunak ever did.
Anderson would have been consigned to the shadows of the backbenches occasionally mumbling about what reprehensible thing his own party had done to his constituency had Sunak not elevated the attention seeking member for Ashfield to such a role within the Conservative Party. The worst part was that Sunak actually thought he was being clever by doing it; that it was symbolic in some way.
The point of Anderson for many Conservatives - especially those on the far right of the party - was that he was seen to bridge the gap between the Conservatives and the so-called Red Wall voters they inherited in 2019. Anderson was the Tories’ ‘connection.’
He has been used as a vessel at different junctures along the way to communicate policy to those who can identify or connect with Anderson - like at the NatCons conference back in May last year, for example, or by featuring prominently at Liz Truss’ PopCons launch in February.
There was always a problem in utilising Anderson for this purpose, however. For a start, Tory insiders viewed Anderson their “secret weapon” - a patronising view I described before, and shared by Conservatives who feel that Anderson:
“..is who [and what] they feel represents the homogeneous “working class man”, uniquely speaking for all “plain-talking” voters in the ubiquitous ‘North’ of England. As though anywhere beyond the reaches of Watford is some far away, grey and fantastical concrete version of Narnia where its citizens eat bacon sandwiches and jauntily ‘ride t’ bikes’ along cobblestone streets to the sound of distant brass bands playing songs in the smoke-filled, post-industrial landscape on the horizon.”
Richard Tice and Reform UK make this same mistake also.
Incidentally -
I first wrote about the possibility of Anderson defecting last year when he was apparently offered “a lot of money to join them.” Anderson added, “I say a lot of money, I mean a lot of money.”
Estimates based on information given to Speaker of the House Lindsay Hoyle by Conservative chief whip Simon Hart indicate that Anderson and other Conservatives were offered around £430,000, potentially in breach of electoral law, on the basis that the sum would be equivalent to their MPs’ salary even if they lost their seats at the next election.
I also highlighted the apparently secret meetings that were held between Anderson, Tice and Tice’s own so-called ‘Tory Defection Unit’ that took place, of all locations, at an unassuming Holiday Inn on the outskirts of South Normanton in Derbyshire.
Anderson's defection to Reform UK at the beginning of the week, then, should have come as no surprise. It was inevitable.