Who knows where Lee Anderson’s ‘political journey’ will take him – but it’s the end for Rishi Sunak

As the Conservative Party’s former deputy chair threatens to defect, he leaves the PM looking ever weaker – and his erstwhile colleagues acting as if they're already in opposition, says Sean O’Grady

Rishi Sunak with the GB News host and now-suspended MP Lee Anderson (PA)

During his latest “exclusive” interview with GB News (well, they do pay him £100,000 a year for this sort of stuff), Lee Anderson, currently ex-Tory MP for Ashfield, said that he’d been on a political journey.

That’s true. A few years ago, he was a Labour councillor and office manager to the then Labour MP for Ashfield, Gloria De Piero (who, oddly enough, also washed up on the shores of GB News as a presenter). He’d been on the Bennite left of Labour for all that time, and in 2017 was happy to campaign for Jeremy Corbyn to be prime minister. The first time he voted Conservative was in the 2019 “get Brexit done” election, when he was elected as a Conservative MP.

Like a few other seats, notably Sedgefield, previously represented by Tony Blair, it was a symbolic breakthrough in the so-called red wall – the defection of the working class to Boris Johnson’s Tory populism (and its, shall we say, overambitious promises about levelling up).

Is the journey over? Is he going to defect to Reform UK? The owner and president of Reform, Nigel Farage, says he’s perfectly welcome. The party leader, Richard Tice, is artfully coy about gaining his first MP. It would usefully add to their momentum.

Anderson refuses to “give a running commentary” on his intentions, which are only partly in his hands – it will be up to Rishi Sunak and his colleagues whether they want Anderson as an official candidate. It is at least possible they’d rather not, and that whatever benefit Anderson gives them as a plain-speaking, pint-drinking ex-miner and “spokesperson for working people of traditional views in the towns of the Midlands and North” is outweighed by his capacity to create mayhem and disgrace.

He himself admits that one regret he has about his Islamophobic attacks on Sadiq Khan is their timing – distracting from Keir Starmer’s own troubles over party discipline on Gaza. Anderson says he gets lots of private messages of support; but he also repels many more moderate Tories, the stereotypical blue-wall types in the home counties. In fact, Anderson even appears to worry some in Reform UK, such as deputy leader Ben Habib.

Anyway, the immediate future of Anderson is obviously the focus of plenty of attention, and a defection would make a sensational news story – much bigger than Andrew Bridgen, another East Midlands Conservative, flouncing off to Lawrence Fox’s eccentric Reclaim outfit.

But would it really matter? Not much. Reform would get some headlines, and a few disillusioned Tories would no doubt think again about voting for their fantastical promises – but even if they did, the net effect is simply to increase the Labour lead and drive the Tories into an even deeper defeat at the next general election.

Whether Ashfield would ever elect Anderson were he to stand on a Reform ticket has yet to be seen, too – though the vote for the local Ashfield Independents (who don’t seem impressed by Anderson) is substantial, and might be key in allowing him to slip through the middle, and also to hang on. But that would still make him Reform’s only MP until, at the earliest, by-elections in prime minister Starmer’s blues-hit mid-term. Maybe. We’re peering long into the abyss here.

What really matters about the Anderson fiasco is that it reminds the voters that the Tories are divided, extreme, prone to racism, and that their leader lacks authority. There’s a good reason why Starmer keeps calling Sunak “weak”. It’s a powerful label, and one that Tony Blair successfully attached to John Major before the 1997 landslide.

Like Major, it’s not Sunak’s fault that his party is an unleadable rabble acting prematurely as if they were already in opposition. In such a situation, Sunak cannot win. If he punished Anderson harder – and Suella Braverman and Liz Truss equally harshly for their own selfish efforts to bring the party into disrepute – he’d have a fresh leadership crisis, because he lacks a strong base in the party, especially in the country at large.

That lack of support, after all, is why he had to reappoint Braverman to the Home Office when he became PM; and why it took him so long to sack her last autumn. Truss is equally capable of causing trouble. From what I’ve seen, they think the militant woke deep-state trans Islamists (or whatever) control the UK; Anderson only thinks it’s Khan, London and Starmer.

By leaving Anderson, Braverman and Truss to carry on with their antics with minimal sanction – not a word of criticism of Anderson beyond just “wrong”, ludicrously – Sunak is indeed left looking weak, because his position is indeed weak. The party is equally obviously divided, as the public noticed some time ago, and it has an increasingly vocal tendency to extremism and attraction to conspiracy theories, of which Anderson’s belief in “Islamist control” is only the latest.

As Anderson says, the people who voted Tory for the first time in 2019 want something to vote for now, and there’s nothing there. Weak party, weak leader. They’re not fit to govern, and Sunak’s tragedy is that there isn’t a single thing he can do about it.

The next steps in Anderson’s odyssey will be mildly diverting to watch – but Sunak’s political journey is over.