Lee Anderson - Nurse, The Screens

Appointing politicians to high office, because the act of their elevation will offend the party’s opponents, rather than the appointee having the ability to carry out the role, only ends one way. The role is not carried out in anything like an optimal manner, the party concerned suffers, and all the while, those opponents provide a chorus of derisive laughter as the barrel is scraped.

Lee Anderson

That thought was clearly not allowed to enter when Rishi Sunak, carrying out his mini-reshuffle earlier this week, somehow promoted Lee Anderson to the role of Tory deputy chairman. Yes, 30p Lee, ejected from the Labour Party, accepted by the Tories, caught passing off a pal as a swing voter, hosting an invitation only Facebook group that was a sewer of racist bigotry, caught on video assaulting a protester (several times), making dishonest claims about how much it costs to cook a meal, and so much more. That Lee Anderson.

Anderson’s elevation did have one supporter: the deeply unpleasant former Murdoch editor Kelvin McFilth, whose successes running the Sun included losing sales on Merseyside after Kel’s smear of Liverpool fans after the Hillsborough stadium disaster in 1989. Because Lee wants to string them up.

Yes, he’s in favour of the death penalty, because “nobody’s ever committed a crime after being executed”. No shit, Sherlock. But on all those occasions where the wrong man was convicted, the real culprit remained free to commit as many crimes as he chose. And there have been a lot of those occasions.

Still, Anderson is standing his ground on his food bank pronouncements, asserting that nurses are paid £30,000 or more and so don’t need to use them. He wants anyone taking issue with this stance to find a nurse in the Ashfield constituency and bring them to himself. Not surprisingly, there have thus far not been any nurses being delivered to his door.

Rishi Sunak has, as the BBC’s Alex Partridge has told, had to distance himself from Anderson’s hanging and flogging agenda, observing “Rishi Sunak tells broadcasters that Lee Anderson's view on the death penalty is ‘not my view’ or the view of the government but they want to ‘bear down on crime’”. Like multiple assaults on protesters, for instance? Maybe not.

And the appointment appears not to be universally popular in Anderson’s own party, as one anonymous Tory MP has told “Lee Anderson is everything that is wrong with the Conservative brand presently. He seems to rejoice in deliberately provoking and making aggressive simplistic statements that fail to recognise the complexities of the issues facing the country”. There was more.

He said WHAT? Oh SHIT

“If this is the new Tory party, many will be forgiven for deserting it”. Especially if Anderson continues to defame those he dislikes, like food poverty campaigner Jack Monroe, who instructed lawyers after recent accusations by The Great Man. And even moreso after his car crash interview yesterday with presenter Verity Cowley on BBC Radio Nottingham. It did not end well.

Ms Cowley brought up Anderson’s 2019 General Election dishonesty, when he was caught trying to pass off a pal as a Labour-to-Tory swing voter, and the very deliberate doorstepping of said pal as a wholly random act. At this point, 30p Lee lost it, demanding to know if Ms Cowley had ever told a lie, telling her it was a yes or no answer and becoming aggressive with it.

It got worse: The Great Man complained that he had agreed to the interview to talk about his elevation to Tory deputy chairman, and then, when he failed to secure a guarantee that the interview would be broadcast in full, demanded that it not be broadcast at all, and if it was, he would not give Ms Cowley another interview ever again. The Beeb has, this time, stood its ground.

So the interview is being played in its entirety, just to show the world what a wonderful person the MP for Ashfield has turned out to be. This has not put off those at the increasingly alt-right Spectator magazine from giving Anderson a suitably fawning interview. But others are not persuaded.

The Secret Barrister is one. “Anybody who supports the death penalty is by definition supporting a system which results in the state killing innocent people. Only somebody with no understanding of history or criminal justice could fail to understand this. And such a person has no place in politics”.

Like the reappearance of Liz Truss, Lee Anderson will do little more for the Tories than persuade more of those swing voters to move in the direction of away, whether in Ashfield, the North West, Greater London or elsewhere. Shooting from the hip can seem very appealing, until the shooter starts shooting his party in the foot. And they can now do nothing to stop him.

Rishi Sunak thought he was showing leadership by appointing Anderson. His problem is that 30p Lee is leading voters away from The Blue Team. Good.

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