A year ago today ConHome published my account of a day spent with Lee Anderson in his constituency of Ashfield, on the westernmost edge of Nottinghamshire.
While driving us from meeting to meeting, he told me something of his early life:
“He has never moved more than five miles from where, in 1967, he was born. His father was a miner, and in 1984, unlike most miners in Nottinghamshire, came out on strike and joined the picket line, where Lee, not yet a miner, joined him: ‘I’ve seen my Dad arrested and thrown in the back of a police van.’
“His father was on strike for nearly a year: ‘The worst part was he went back and had to work with men who’d dodged the picket lines.’
“‘We loathed Thatcher with a passion,’ Anderson said as he recalled the devastating effects of pit closures on local communities.
“His heroes in those days were Arthur Scargill, the President of the National Union of Mineworkers, Dennis Skinner, former miner and MP for Bolsover for 49 years, and Tony Benn, all of whom he heard speak in Chesterfield, Benn’s seat from 1984-2001.”
Anderson himself spent 11 or 12 years as a miner, having grown up in a household where the alarm clock of his father went off at 4.30 each morning, to awaken him to go down the pit: “Hearing that for years and years conditioned me to know I had to do the same. That was what men did.”
But then men stopped doing it, for in Nottinghamshire as across the country, the pits closed, and so did the vital network of clubs and other institutions which depended on the pit, and together sustained an intense local pride.
It is easy to forget, if one did not experience it, the trauma inflicted by these events. Driving around with Anderson, one saw another quality behind his rough, tough manner and readiness to make jokes:
“Like many men who tell jokes, Anderson does so in part as a protective screen for his feelings. He is, one might say, the Boris Johnson of Ashfield, connecting with the wider public because it senses his vulnerability as well as his toughness.”
None of which is a justification for what Anderson said about Sadiq Khan. It is not true that “the Islamists have…got control of Khan and they’ve got control of London, and they’ve got control of Starmer as well” (the last part of this has somehow been overlooked), or that Khan has “given our capital city away to his mates”.
The more accurate charge to make against Khan – made as it happens in a ConHome profile of him published in January 2016, shortly before he became Mayor – is that he possesses a remarkable ability to understand what an audience wants to hear, and an almost unlimited willingness to say it.
Khan is a yes-man, which is why after nearly eight years in office he is so weak, and cannot rise to the level of events. All he offers is approval of what is approved of, and even his most loyal supporters are underwhelmed by him.
Anderson has the opposite problem. He is a rebel, who cannot see a generally approved idea without giving it a good kick, to see what if anything it is made of. This is rude of him, but does not make him a racist.
The heroes of Anderson’s youth were the rebels who raised the miners in revolt, and led them to a terrible defeat.
By the time Momentum, the heirs to Scargill, Skinner and Benn, seized control of Ashfield Council, Anderson had moved away from that school of thought, and towards a more moderate position. He had become a Labour councillor, and had run two general election campaigns for the Labour MP for Ashfield, Gloria De Piero, who was herself a Momentum target.
In 2018, at a Labour Group meeting in Ashfield, one of the Momentum councillors asked Anderson, “Have you ever read the works of Karl Marx?”
“No,” Anderson replied, whereupon the Momentum man said: “Why don’t you f*** off and join the Tory Party?”. “The Labour Party do give good career advice,” Anderson remarked with a laugh, for that is what he did.
Conservatives sometimes overlook the important part played by Momentum in driving moderate Labour supporters out of that party.
Anderson was adopted as the Conservative parliamentary candidate in Ashfield, which in December 2019 he won by a majority of 5,733 over a locally well-known Independent, with Labour (for whom De Piero had decided not to stand) pushed into third place.
Boris Johnson, himself by temperament and practice an insurgent, had led the Conservatives to victory in many Red Wall seats where the great traditional industries had collapsed, support for Labour had long been declining, and Brexit offered the chance to rebel not just against Brussels but against a distant and disdainful London Establishment.
Anderson soon emerged as one of the most articulate and amusing of the Red Wall MPs. A year ago I asked him what his parents thought about his change of political allegiance:
“’They were very grumpy when I first joined the Tory Party,’ he replied, ‘but then they fell in love with Boris.’
“Anderson said that episodes such as getting stuck on the zip wire, and the rugby tackle by Johnson during a charity football match, made working-class people think, ‘Oh, he’s making mistakes. He’s one of us. He’s happy to laugh at himself.
“’When my Dad saw the rugby tackle, he could not stop laughing, especially as it were Germany as well.’”
Although Anderson refused yesterday to apologise to Khan, he did issue an important clarification:
“The vast majority of our Muslim friends in the UK are decent, hardworking citizens who make an amazing contribution to our society and their religion should not be blamed for the actions of a tiny minority of extremists.”
This row will perhaps have the useful effect of forcing people to say rather more clearly what they mean, but one hopes it will not be used as an excuse to read an unending series of prosy lectures to Red Wall MPs and voters from a position of ineffable moral superiority.
Neither Anderson, nor his office staff (some of them former Labour members), nor his constituents (many of them former Labour voters), deserve to be cast into outer darkness.
The Conservative Party is a national party, and the nation it seeks to represent includes both Ashfield and London, both Christians and Muslims, and indeed many people of other faiths or, more frequently, of none.
It follows that Rishi Sunak is right to leave the way open for Anderson to rejoin the party in due course, and that those on either side of this argument who wish to maintain embittered and extreme opinions are in error.