Three parties Lee Anderson. Labour, Conservative and now Reform. Just weeks ago he batted off suggestions he’d defect to Reform, having lost his job as deputy party chair for rebelling over the Rwanda bill.
“It’s them that’s given me a political home, so why would I knife them in the back?” he said in January, when asked about the Conservatives.
On Monday, it was a full frontal assault as Mr Anderson, having been suspended from the party last month after claiming “Islamists” had “got control” of London mayor Sadiq Khan, joined Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, in a wounding blow to Rishi Sunak.
Mr Anderson, in a terse media briefing, told his audience that he had “done a lot of soul searching” and had decided to quit the Tories to “get my country back”, as he launched a broadside against old colleagues for stifling “free speech” and trying to shut him down for “speaking his mind”.
“People will say that I’ve took a gamble. And I’m prepared to gamble on myself,” he told his audience. “And like millions of people up and down the country, all I want is my country back.”
His defection is an undoubted coup for Reform, the successor to Mr Farage’s Brexit party, which plays into the rightwing populism of Donald Trump and carries the slogan: “Make Britain Great Again.”
Politics latest: Nigel Farage hails defection that gives his party its first MP
For Mr Sunak, there is no other way to spin this than a body blow. Within hours of Mr Anderson’s defection – and the warning from Reform UK’s Richard Tice more are to come – other Conservative MPs were coming forward to express regret, not anger, over the defection, as they sided with Mr Anderson’s sentiments, throwing the spotlight once more on the deep party divisions that the current prime minister simply cannot contain.
The New Conservatives grouping on the right of the party issued a statement saying “we cannot pretend any longer the plan is working” as they urged the prime minister “to change course urgently”.
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