“We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” So said Benjamin Franklin. So says political convention. But no-one has told Lee Anderson.
The former miner – now Conservative Party Deputy Chairman – needs no introduction. He was this site’s Backbencher of the Year in 2022, voted so by its readers in December’s survey. The award got some media pick-up, coming as it did on December 27, when political news tends to be rather sparse. Perhaps we’re responsible – or rather perhaps you are – for Anderson’s rise.
At any rate, his pungent views need no introduction. There have been two spectacular examples this week. Four days ago, he told the Daily Express that if asylum claimants “don’t like barges then they should f*ck off back to France”. A day later, he said on GB News that “I’m the deputy chair of the Conservative Party, we’re in government, and we have failed on [small boats]. There’s no doubt about it.”
No Tory front bencher has dared to call Anderson out for lowering the political tone by deploying the f-word (though some will doubtless think that he has). But Robert Jenrick had little alternative but to disagree with Anderson’s verdict on the Government’s record over small boats when asked about it. So – another “Tory split”. Does it really matter?
Perhaps the age of politicians “singing off the same hymn sheet”, perfected by the Alastair Campbell era of spin, has been killed by the rise of social media. There have always been off-key politicians, of course. In the red corner, John Prescott, Clare Short, Jess Phillips; in the blue one, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Ann Widdecombe, Nadine Dorries. Plus the most wayward of them all, who built going off message into a engine of political self-promotion: Boris Johnson.
But Anderson is different because of that most British of preoccuptions: class. Or, to be more precise, background. Dorries is working-class, but she isn’t a former miner, an ex-Labour councillor, and MP for a Midlands marginal, Ashfield – Labour in every general election since its creation, and so another brick in the Red Wall.
Popular with our readers, his colleagues and, according to Andrew Gimson’s report from Ashfield, his constituents, Labour doesn’t quite seem to know what to do about Anderson. Attack him, and his former party risks seeming to attack the party’s old heartlands, of which Ashfield is typical. Fail to do so, and it offends its new ones, exemplified by Keir Starmer’s own seat in Holborn and St Pancras.
“Has anyone tried, since your promotion, to muzzle you?” Andrew asked Anderson during his Ashfield visit, to which he replied: “When I got the job, the message loud and clear was ‘keep saying what you’re saying, keep doing what you’re doing’.” Was that the point of the appointment? To out-Heineken even Johnson, and far more authentically?
Or, as the Left would collectively see it, froth up voters’ worst instincts into a foam of racism, self-righteous resentment, and hatred? On the one hand, nice Sunak; on the other, nasty Anderson – doing the former’s dirty work for him on social media and GB news while he postures hypocritically about rebuilding trust in politics. And, if so, have the Conservatives miscalculated, because their Deputy Chairman is repelling more voters than he attracts?
It’s important in mulling the question to grasp that Anderson is actually a Deputy Chairman, rather than the Deputy Chairman. The Party’s website, which has sections on gender pay statistics and Parliamentary Diversity Data, doesn’t appear to list this ever-churning cast.
However, one of them is Nickie Aiken, MP for the Cities of London and Westminster, and her name has been cited to me as helping to explain Anderson’s appointment. If one Deputy Chairman was from the capital, another must come from the provinces – and one of the Party’s new seats at that. There was another reason: “Anderson is an excellent communicator”. Quite so: no wonder he now has his own GB News show.
I bet he keeps his grip on it even if he loses Ashfield next year. “Like many men who tell jokes, Anderson does so in part as a protective screen for his feelings…connecting with the wider public because it senses his vulnerability as well as his toughness,” Andrew wrote. Contrary to the Left’s take, he seems to be a nice guy.
As for being put in place to speak plainly – saying in language that people will understand that people who arrive by small boat have no reason to leave France and should go back there – there can be no doubt about it: of course that will be part of the reason for his appointment. But that doesn’t mean that he was put in place to eff and blind. Which points to a general truth about Number 10, whichever party holds office at any particular time.
A canny Minister’s first response, when told that Downing Street wants something done, will always be the same: who in Downing Street? I doubt that the team at the top of the party grasped when appointing Anderson just how off message he is capable of being. A conventional politician never says “we have failed”, at least until after an election is lost.
Let alone draw attention to the fact he is a Deputy Chairman of a party with such a record in his view. So there will be different views in Number Ten and CCHQ from different people. I doubt that Sunak instigated the appointment himself or was especially engaged with it. So is Anderson a net winner or loser of Conservative votes? The bleedingly obvious answer is there is no way of knowing.
Trying to work it out would be impossible – like trying to pick out what tune a singer is crooning while the choir warbles another one. Which takes us back to that familiar metaphor of “singing from the same hymn sheet”. Political parties look increasingly like choirs in which each member sings their own song.
Social media is part of the reason, ending as it has the age of the news cycle. The transformation of MPs into local campaigners, exemplified by recent Tory parliamentary selections – is another. And as the wrecking of Johnson’s housing plans showed, an 80 seat majority isn’t what it was. They are simply less willing to be told what to do. Local interests have never had it so good. The national one is another matter.
How will houses that families need get built, if MPs won’t back their construction? Where will the new nuclear power stations come from, in a country that was originally a nuclear leader, but has since found it easier to gamble on foreign gas – despot-controlled at that? Can investment zones really sing without a big relaxation of planning constraints?
Then there is the newish cultural bias to authenticity. And Anderson is nothing if not Mr Authenticity. His university-educated opponents will view him as a relic of the past. I see his refusal to stay on message as the shape of things to come.