The rise of 30p Lee
Five years ago, a Labour councillor named Lee Anderson hired a digger and dumped two big concrete blocks across the entrance of a car park at Strawberry Bank, the highest point in Nottinghamshire. Anderson’s goal, said Patrick Maguire in The Times, was to stop Travellers pitching camp at the beauty spot, by personally erecting a barrier after the council had refused to. It was “one man’s lonely monument to disillusionment with the political process in what was not yet called the ‘red wall’”. Anderson, a former miner who once counted Dennis Skinner and Arthur Scargill among his heroes, was suspended by the Labour Party. Fiercely pro-Brexit and anti-Corbyn, he joined the Conservatives in time to stand as an MP in 2019 – and swiftly became their most “singular and controversial” backbencher: a right-wing culture warrior and “unlikely darling of the Tory rubber-chicken circuit”. Now Anderson’s been made the Tories’ deputy chairman, said Tony Parsons in The Sun. Good for him. He’s a plain-speaking “voice of the people” – and an inspired choice in a party dominated by “Oxbridge degrees” and “private fortunes”.
The only problem is that Anderson is “an imbecile of the very highest order”, said Ian Dunt in The i Paper. During that 2019 campaign, he was caught out staging a sham door-step encounter, for the benefit of TV cameras, with a “voter” who was in fact his friend. Since entering the Commons, he has become the “Red Wall Rottweiler” – a “moron” who “spits bile about Travellers and trans people” without restraint or common decency. He has been dubbed “30p Lee” for claiming poor people can cook a meal for 30 pence, and thinks nurses only use foodbanks because they don’t budget properly. Rishi Sunak has appointed Anderson as a sop to the Tories’ “reactionary wing”. But in validating his brand of “performative meanness”, the PM has undermined his own standing as a “serious” figure.
Anderson’s support for the death penalty (“100% effective”) has especially angered “progressives”, said Dan Hodges in The Mail on Sunday. But on this, as on much else, Anderson speaks for a “sizeable proportion of working people”. The appointment won’t change much. “Sunak could have appointed the Lord Almighty (He/Him) as deputy chairman and it would be unlikely to save his party.” But at least the episode shows up the snobbery of the Left, and its contempt for “anyone who dares question their right to dictate the values of today’s Britain”. Actually, what it really shows is that today’s Tory party lacks the merest shred of unity or purpose, said Hugo Rifkind in The Times. Anderson’s agenda – restoring the death penalty, scrapping net zero, cutting taxes now – is entirely at odds with that of his party and its leader. So what exactly is it that “makes them all Conservatives rather than something else”? Personally, I have “absolutely no idea. I don’t think they do either.”