You probably first heard of Lee Anderson when he declared he couldn’t bear to watch
England in the 2021 Euros because its players were taking the knee. Although it may have been the previous month when he sought notoriety by announcing he had ripped up his TV licence because the
BBC was “rotten”. Or maybe it was when he was filmed in 2019 telling a mate whose support he was about to ask for: “Make out you know who I am but not that you’re a friend”. But back to him cancelling himself from watching his “beloved England” because the players were offering a gesture of solidarity with black colleagues who suffered from
racism. Or as Anderson saw it: “Supporting a political movement whose core principles aim to undermine our way of life.” Which was an early indicator of what he means today when he says “I want my country back” despite his beloved
Brexit supposedly doing just that. The country he wants back is a mythical post-war utopia where we still have an Empire, hanging, conscription, bobbies on bicycles, the three Rs, imperial measures,
Women who know their place, no curry houses and the population is almost entirely made up of its indigenous people. The phrase is supposed to make us believe he is taking a stand against pro-Palestine marches and wokies pulling down statues but, like
Donald Trump, we know exactly what he means. Taking the country back to a time when it was overwhelmingly white. Anderson talks reverentially of his “political journey” like he was a Mandela or a Gandhi, when in six years he jumped from being a
Labour councillor to a Tory MP to the poster boy for the latest hard-right, single-issue anti-immigration party
Nigel Farage presides over. A party he recently denigrated as “amateurs” with a “Poundshop” leader whom he would never join. Where next? National Action? This is not the journey of a principled politician but of a hypocritical, opportunistic pub bore. A Six Bob Trump who thinks he’s a Man of the People when he’s a thin-skinned narcissist who permanently looks like he’s about to self-combust with hate. He’s yet another embarrassment to Rishi Sunak who made him deputy party chairman because he naively thought he would woo Northern voters to the Tories. But then what would you expect from a public school-educated former Goldman Sachs banker who admitted that he had no working class mates growing up? It was always likely that Sunak would have to take the whip off his token Northern Bloke and no surprise it came after a dumb and racist assertion that “Islamists” have control of
London because the Muslim mayor had given the capital to “his mates”. Anderson says he drinks in Ashfield with real working-class people who tell him he speaks their no-nonsense language. Well I drink in a dockers’ pub in
Liverpool and I don’t know anyone in there who spouts Six Bob Trump’s nonsensical language or divisive thoughts. He says he doesn’t recognise his country any more and that there are many people who think the same. I reckon there are many more who don’t recognise the mythical
Britain he fantasises about for political gain. Which is why his political journey will hopefully end at a JobCentre come the next
election.