Lee Anderson: tribune of the people?

The Conservatives' deputy chairman is supposed to appeal to working-class voters, but his grim-faced, mean-minded attitude is not what people want

Typically we think of “working-class Conservatives” as an oddity, if not a contradiction in terms. If we stop for a moment, however, it must be true that substantial numbers of working-class voters choose the Conservative Party: how else, after all, could the party have been in office for more than three-quarters of the last century? That kind of electoral dominance could not have been sustained merely middle-class votes. Nevertheless, partly because of the origins of Labour, we still see our party politics in terms of polar opposites: the Labour Party for the working class and the Conservative Party for the middle class.

There are acknowledged exceptions. We take as a fundamental truth of political history that Thatcher reached out to the working class, to the C2 (skilled manual occupations) and DE (semi-skilled and unskilled) sections of the electorate with a range of policies which prised them away from the Labour Party: the right to buy council houses, the image of the prudent, almost long-suffering housewife, the social conservatism, willing to say the unsayable when it came to race relations and immigration. Although in class terms she was very similar to her predecessor, Edward Heath, both were worlds away from the leaders who had come before them: Douglas-Home, Macmillan, Eden, Churchill. And Thatcher understood the power of her origins, if carefully and selectively revealed and advertised, in a way Heath simply could not.

We ought to remember that for more than 30 years, from 1965 to 1997, the Conservative Party was led by those of working-class or lower-middle-class origins. Heath’s parents were a carpenter and a lady’s maid, Thatcher’s father was a grocer and Major was born to a former music hall artiste turned garden-ornament manufacturer and a part-time library assistant. Of the three, Major suffered genuine poverty and hardship as a child, while Heath and Thatcher relied heavily on grammar school and Oxford to raise their prospects (and, in Heath’s case, a ‘good war’ with the Royal Artillery). Of the Labour leaders they faced, only James Callaghan, whose Royal Navy veteran father died at 44, leaving the family without an income, faced comparable or more severe hardships when growing up.

We talk very little about John Major’s appeal to working-class voters. Last November, I wrote a semi-speculative piece about the aims of the Major government and the sort of Britain he wanted to create, before everything was blown off course by Black Wednesday. Although, like many a grandee on both sides, he has become fixated and unbalanced by Brexit over the last few years, Major is a essentially a kindly and decent man, sharper and funnier than his public image allowed to be seen, but possessed of strong, stubborn values of opportunity and fairness. At the 1992 general election, although the Conservative majority fell from Thatcher’s mighty 102 to a mere 21, Major’s party won more votes—14,093,007—than any party has ever done. Yet this extraordinary feat, masked by the system of first past the post which has often benefited the Tories in the past, remains a niche observation, a quirky fact about the election. In terms of individual votes, relatively little changed: the Conservatives declined by a mere 0.3 per cent, while Labour gained 3.6 per cent.

Most recently, of course, the Conservatives made daring raids deep into traditional Labour territory with its capture of so-called “Red Wall” seats at the 2019 general election. These were constituencies primary in the Midlands and North of England which had been held by the Labour Party for generations, in some cases since they were created, and had never really been considered ‘in play’. Some psephologists argue against a coherent identity for these seats, but the stereotype is of an area where the working-class vote had been chipped away by UKIP, which were often socially conservative, supportive of Brexit and concerned about immigration, and which swung to the Conservatives in 2109 because withdrawal from the European Union cut across traditional class boundaries.

However complicated the underlying electoral trends, the capture of some of these seats was eye-catching. I grew up in the North-East, so to see Conservatives win places like Blyth Valley (Labour since its creation in 1950), Bishop Auckland (never taken by the Tories since 1885), North West Durham (a Labour stronghold since 1950) and Sedgefield (the fortress of Sir Tony Blair, where I spent my first few years) was astounding and suggested a truly seismic realignment. There is still no consensus on why these constituencies switched their allegiance, whether it was purely due to Brexit, affected by the unique appeal of Boris Johnson, reflective of an erosion of tribal loyalties to the Labour Party or a more general demographic transformation. Whatever the reason, the Conservatives have understood since 2019 that retaining at least some of these seats is essential to its future electoral success, and sustaining and replicating its victories there could offer the key to fundamental change in the voting patterns of the British people.

The Conservative Party has long cherished working-class champions or exemplars, though they have often been regarded as exotic, curious and head-scratching, specimens which are fostered but do not always breed in great numbers. Perhaps the most famous example was Norman Tebbit, MP for Epping (1970-74) then Chingford (1974-92), who came to embody the no-nonsense self-reliance of Thatcherism. He was born to working-class parents in Enfield, educated at a selective state school and ended up, after National Service with the Royal Air Force, as a pilot with BOAC. In the media, he came to represent the hard-faced ruthlessness and self-interest of 1980s Conservatism, depicted by Spitting Image as a leather jacket-wearing skinhead who beat and bullied other members of the cabinet. Labour’s Michael Foot once described him in the House of Commons as “a semi-house-trained polecat”, which attack Tebbit later noted gave him unexpected fame. But the seal was set on his reputation at the 1981 Conservative Party conference, when he responded with cold anger to a suggestion, in the wake of rioting in Handsworth and Brixton, that public disorder was simply the product of unemployment.

I grew up in the ’30s with an unemployed father. He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking till he found it.

The crowd loved it. And it was a depiction of the working-class mindset which the Conservatives found comforting and attractive: hard-bitten, inured to the harsh realities of life and impatient of more sensitive foppery higher up the social scale.

Tebbit was a genuinely heavyweight figure in the party, who might have been a successor to Thatcher had not his wife been grievously injured in the bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton by the IRA in 1984. There have been other stereotypes, generally of less seniority but usually cut from similar cloth: plain-spoken, right-wing, impatiently populist and pugnacious. There was Sir Marcus Fox, the “Shipley strangler” who became chairman of the 1922 Committee (1992-97), ineffably Yorkshire and robust on race relations and law and order; Terry Dicks, Bristolian but Member for Hayes and Harlington in west London, whose performative philistinism led him to be dubbed by Tony Banks “living proof that a pig’s bladder on a stick can be elected as a Member of Parliament”; from north of the border, Bill Walker, born in a Dundee tenement and leaving school at 14, who campaigned for the return of corporal punishment and achieved the extraordinary feat, for a Scottish Conservative, of never achieving ministerial office. More recently, the limelight has been hogged by Andrew Bridgen, MP for North-West Leicestershire since 2010, who tags himself indefatigably as a “small businessman” and has been a stout advocate of Brexit and a smaller state. He also has the distinction of having submitted letters of no confidence in every prime minister from David Cameron to Liz Truss.

The representation of working-class people in Parliament is low and declining. But it remains especially low in the Conservative Party: a study published by the Institute for Public Policy Research in July 2022 indicated that only one in 100 Tory MPs came from a working-class background, while a third of the population falls into that category, and although there are obvious socio-economic factors which might contribute to this statistic, all parties are aware of the danger of working-class voters feeling underrepresented and disenfranchised. The Conservative Party’s latest response to this problem has been the promotion to deputy chairman of the party of the MP for Ashfield, Lee Anderson.

Anderson has certainly made a splash in terms of publicity. Already famous or notorious for staging a supposedly spontaneous encounter with a constituent during the 2019 general election campaign while being followed by Michael Crick of Channel 4 News—he was recorded muttering to a man to “make out you know who I am, that you know I’m the candidate but not that you are a friend”—he suggested that nuisance tenants on a council estate should be evicted and housed in tents while being forced to pick vegetables in nearby fields. He was also accused of being an active member of a Facebook group which supported the far-right provocateur Tommy Robinson and propagated conspiracy theories about billionaire George Soros (he apologised for his participation and claimed to have left the group).

He is not—and this is not intended in any way as a criticism—a lifelong Conservative. He was previously a Labour member of Ashfield District Council, and for five years worked as office manager for the local Labour MP, the able and amiable Gloria De Piero, who stood down in 2019. Anderson was suspended by the Labour group (though not by the party itself) in February 2018 after he received a community protection warning for blocking a road with boulders to stop Travellers gaining access to a site where he feared they might encamp. The following month, he joined the Conservative Party, blaming a “hard-left” takeover of the local Labour Party by Momentum supporters.

Since his election to the House of Commons, Anderson has embraced a predictable set of populist, right-wing causes: he signed a letter to The Telegraph accusing the National Trust of being “coloured by cultural Marxist dogma” when it published a report into the links between colonialism and slavery; he condemned the England football team for taking the knee during matches in the Euro 2020 tournament; he proposed processing applicants for asylum offshore in the Falkland Islands; and during the passage of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, he expressed trenchant opinions on his local Traveller communities:

The Gypsy encampments that we are talking about in places such as Ashfield are not the traditional, old-fashioned Gypsies sat there playing the mandolin, flogging lucky heather and telling fortunes. The Travellers I am talking about are more likely to be seen leaving your garden shed at 3 o’clock in the morning, probably with your lawnmower and half of your tools. That happens every single time they come to Ashfield.

Predictably, he joined the Common Sense Group of Conservative MPs when it was founded in the summer of 2020 as a successor to the largely unlamented Cornerstone Group of social conservatives, formed in 2005 and quickly nicknamed “Tombstone” by its opponents.

Anderson has developed—“refined” would be a misleading term—this populist persona in ways which are less than surprising. He is not a man at whose views on any given matter it would be difficult to guess. Responding to criticisms of the widespread need for food banks, he argued that it was a myth, created mostly by ignorance of proper budgeting and cooking. He invited opposition MPs to visit a food bank in his constituency, where there were mandatory cooking courses and meals for a day could be made for around 30p, leading to his being dubbed “30p Lee”.

In June 2022, he stated publicly that the attacks on Boris Johnson’s faltering premiership stemmed from “a witch hunt led by the BBC”, though the following month, in the wake of Johnson’s clumsy handling of the Christopher Pincher scandal, he withdrew his support from the prime minister and campaigned for Kemi Badenoch to replace him. When Badenoch was eliminated from the contest, he transferred his support to Liz Truss. Later in the year, questioned by Talk TV on the possible election of Eddie Izzard as an MP, he said of the transgender comedian:

Is that what’s coming to parliament? I think it opens a whole new debate, mate. I’m going to be honest now, controversial as always, if he does get elected and I’m still here, I shouldn’t be following him into the toilets.

Quite what Anderson feared would ensue was not clear. He had already framed the argument in class terms, remarking “you know what, the old traditional working-class Labour voters will take a look at Eddie Izzard and think, y’know, really?”

This carefully crafted persona is the principal reason that Anderson found himself promoted in the reshuffle last month following Nadhim Zahawi’s resignation as party chairman. With the lively and spring-heeled trade minister Greg Hands taking the reins at Conservative Campaign Headquarters, Anderson was appointed deputy chairman. (The sometimes-lugubrious Geordie Kevin Maguire pointed out recently in The New Statesman that Anderson is a deputy chairman rather than the deputy chairman: also holding that title are former communications guru and MP for the Cities of London and Westminster Nickie Aiken; ex-local government minister and serial loyalist Luke Hall, MP for Thornbury and Yate; Army reservist and cancer survivor Jack Lopresti, MP for Filton and Bradley Stoke; and MP for Stockton South Matt Vickers (another MP born in the same hospital as me).

The role of the deputy chairmen is not clear. They are, significantly, perhaps, not obviously listed on the party’s website, and, with the exception of Lopresti, who is responsible for engaging with members of the Armed Forces and veterans, do not seem to have clearly defined portfolios, as has sometimes happened in the past. It is perhaps significant that the five deputy chairmen come from geographically distributed constituencies, London (Aiken), the Midlands (Anderson), the North-East (Vickers) and the South-West (Lopresti and Hall). But there are other distinctions too.

Anderson’s role is not hard to divine. The Guardian was at its sniffiest when it dissected his profile under the headline “Lee Anderson: new Tory deputy chair is one-man controversy machine”, but that does not mean it was wrong. Its political correspondent, Peter Walker, contrasted Hands, as chairman, a former banker and central London MP, with Anderson, who worked for 10 years as a coal miner and was a single parent. Noting the potential appeal of a genuine working-class MP, Walker nonetheless pointed to a man whose “trenchant views on the world are presented as unvarnished common sense but are seen by sceptics as performative and unnecessarily divisive”. He also described him as “an enthusiastic culture warrior” and suggested that the prime minister might have calculated that Anderson would “help to fire up the more traditionalist activist base”.

In fact, though I tease The Guardian, I do not largely dissent from Walker’s analysis. It is overwhelmingly likely that Rishi Sunak chose Anderson to be a ready-made media performer for the government because of his blunt, plain-speaking, supposedly authentic views. If the Red Wall seats are to be retained, it seems logical that their supposedly socially conservative views and dislike of elaborate verbiage should be mirrored in someone at the top of the Conservative Party.

I think this is wrong. I know the kind of area Sunak seems to think Anderson will be able to capture: I grew up in Sunderland, a broadly Labour voting area since the Second World War (with the exception of the imperialist and early Monday Club member Paul Williams, who was MP for Sunderland South from 1953 to 1964), which supported Brexit by roughly two-to-one and declared the first vote for Brexit of the referendum. The city saw unrest when Tommy Robinson staged a book signing there in 2017 (staged in the less-than-salubrious surroundings of News and Booze, a spartan off-licence off the Market Square), and Robinson kindled the atmosphere of a football match between Sunderland and Celtic by wearing a shirt of Rangers (Celtic’s ancient enemies, of course), though his connections to the Protestant community of south-west Glasgow is unclear. There were further demonstrations which attracted far-right and racist elements in 2018, in part prompted by a series of sexual assaults attributed to immigrants.

This picture was reinforced by a 2020 study from Newcastle University, Growing up in Sunderland: Young People, Politics and Place, which examined issues like Brexit, racism and Islamophobia. Behind some of the grimmer headlines, however, the research found that most people were tolerant of migrants, endorsed multiculturalism and regarded increasing diversity as a benefit for the city. While it found that there was exposure to racism, it emphasised the importance of economic well-being, and the lack of opportunities. That accords with my anecdotal observations over 40 years.

I dwell on Sunderland because, while I cannot offer deep statistical analysis, I can speak with some authority on a purely observational basis. I certainly regard myself as having as much insight into the minds of working-class voters as the multimillionaire prime minister, educated at Winchester and Lincoln College, Oxford. (Please be clear: I am by no means saying Sunak is too rich or privileged to be prime minister. I am simply suggesting that his perspective, just like mine, is partial.) If the thesis which I am proposing is correct—that Lee Anderson’s role in the senior ranks of the Conservative Party is to reflect the views of a socially conservative working class and thereby attract their electoral support—then I think it is a miscalculation, and potentially a very bad one.

There are, in my view, to parts to the miscalculation. The first is that Red Wall seats and other working-class areas where the Conservatives might hope to garner votes are substantially conservative on issues such as immigration, poverty relief, gender and so-called “culture war” issues. The first and perhaps most important is immigration. Although we clearly still live in a society which contains racist elements, the picture is improving. Afro-Caribbeans, for example, no longer face formal discrimination, although they remain in some ways disadvantaged and underrepresented; opposition to interracial marriage has fallen away substantially; and a cursory examination of the Conservative and Labour front benches in Parliament will demonstrate a much greater presence of non-whites (as well as women).

Areas of sensitivity remain, and we often handle them very clumsily. While the idea that child sexual exploitation is disproportionately committed by men of South Asian heritage has been disproved, there are circumstantial reasons to suppose that some now-infamous instances have been inadequately investigated due to fears of increasing racial tensions. Similar fears have been stoked by the apparent suspension from Kettlethorpe High School in Wakefield of four students for a “hate incident” involving a translation of the Qur’an, and by the suspension of a teacher at Batley Grammar School for showing an “inappropriate” cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed. The actions of local officials have made it easy to create a narrative that “the establishment” is bowing too readily to pressure from Muslim communities to take measures which are unacceptable in British society.

I think much anxiety is not as simple as race-based suspicion and fear of immigrants. There are concerns that substantial immigration will put greater strain on our social infrastructure, particularly in terms of schools and the NHS, at a time when we are already seeing the effect of huge pressure on services. There is also a feeling that housing is both scarce and expensive, and a belief that immigrants which exacerbate that situation. These fears are not wholly justified: we easily forget that immigrants will contribute to the economy through taxation and productivity. It is not easy to determine irrefutable facts, but a recent briefing from the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory concluded that the overall effect of immigration in economic terms is small but will eventually help reduce government debt. It may also have indirect beneficial effects; for example, migrant workers employed in child care may free up other members of the workforce to increase their contributions.

Essentially, the Conservative Party has two choices, choices which, to an extent, always face a governing party going into an election. No-one is in any doubt that times are hard: the economy is fragile, albeit showing some signs of upward movement, the cost of living crisis is still making itself felt, especially in terms of fuel bills, and the war in Ukraine grinds on, affecting everything we do but in particular dominating our strategic outlook. That being the case, the choice is to stress the danger of a Labour government, play on the electorate’s fears and uncertainties and present the Conservatives as the least-bad managers of dreadfully challenging times, hoping to stanch the bleeding; or to present a positive, creative, imaginative vision for the United Kingdom, not just in 2025 but 2030 and beyond. I wrote recently of the dangers of appealing to the base, especially when we are not at all clear that the base exists in its traditional form, and, regretfully, I think the introduction of the Illegal Migration Bill and the “Stop the Boats” campaign might well represent a negative, cramped, fearful appeal to a narrow section of the voting public.

To be unmistakably clear, seeking to control immigration is not inherently negative, regressive or indicative of far-right instincts. Being able to say who does and does not enter the country is a basic function and right of any nation state: what matters is not the principle but the mechanism. My concern is that the mood music chosen by the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, is almost deliberately sour, suspicious and mean-minded, proceeding from assumptions of illegality and fraud and seeking to minimise false claimants while accepting a cost of those who are entitled to come here. The potential corollary, leaving the European Convention on Human Rights and therefore, in all likelihood, the Council of Europe, strikes me as reputationally foolish, seating us at a side table with Russia and Belarus, and it is a sledgehammer to crack a nut; unless by means of the Illegal Migration Bill we grow the nut to a size where only a sledgehammer will do.

More than anything, I think to adopt an Anderson-style programme—suspicious of minorities, unthinking pursuit of a right-wing culture-war campaign, a harsh approach to the poor and disadvantaged, generally an impatience with those who are in some ways different—is patronising towards the working class. It says that these are simple, uninformed people operating on instinct, and base instinct at that, whose primary concern is to protect their own position, however precarious, and to put out of mind those who may need our help. Turn inwards on ourselves, protect the homestead and ignore the outside world. Whether or not I think this is a mistaken policy, I think it misreads the attitudes of the voters and risks missing a huge opportunity.

Let me say this: I don’t know Lee Anderson, I haven’t met him—he arrived in the Commons after my time—and he may in person be fantastically charming and civilised. But that doesn’t matter. Because the vast majority of voters will never meet him either, and so must, as I do, judge him on the content and tenor of his broadcast and published remarks. I think he knows that, and I think the prime minister knows that. For better or worse, I think that the impression Anderson projects is intentional and is tuned to the audience he is aiming at, carrying the message he intends. That is the problem.

I genuinely feel sorry for Rishi Sunak. (Yes, I know his £750 million will cushion any blows he may receive.) He has acceded to the premiership at a young age, our first millennial prime minister, but he did so at the second time of asking and at a time in the electoral cycle at which it is at least possible that he will lead the party to defeat in 2024 and feel obliged to step down, his political career very possibly over before he reached the middle of his 40s. And he comes to the position relatively unequipped: although his career in finance should prepare him to some extent for the rigours of economic policy, working for the mighty Goldman Sachs and then in the world of hedge funds is not the same as managing a national economy, with a million variables, intense pressures from all sides and a very real human cost for getting things wrong. He has no experience in foreign affairs or defence, and there are rumours that he also has very little feel for the area, reluctant or unable to grasp broader strategic concepts than simple expenditure.

It must seem easy, therefore, for Sunak to play “safe” (though I refute that notion), run a cautious campaign and seek, at best, to minimise losses. But I am not at all sure that will be enough. Perhaps I have too eager a instinct for the dramatic and the adventurous, but it seems to me that, with perhaps 18 months of the parliament left to run, the government should broaden its horizons and engage in a wider conversation of what kind of country we want the United Kingdom to be: what are our guiding principles, what are our long-term goals, where do our major alliances lie, and how do we want to carry ourselves in the world? These are tough questions and risk opening the door to failure, but it is otherwise very difficult to present a party which has been in power for 13 years (likely 14 by the time of the election) as dynamic, hopeful and energetic. A bold vision, in short, gives the Conservatives a chance.