Well, well, well. The rumours turned out to be true. This morning the former deputy chairman of the Tory party — who lost the whip last month for refusing to apologise for ‘Islamophobic’ comments — defected to Reform UK. The red wall Rottweiler told reporters that ‘constituents like my mum and dad told me they could not vote for me’ unless he jumped ship, adding: ‘I want my country back.’

A magpie for news headlines, Anderson has generated some rather colourful examples in recent months. The MP has told asylum seekers to ‘f*** off back to France’, been dubbed ‘30p Lee’ after taking a controversial stance on food banks and in 2019 was even caught setting up a fake doorstep chat with a friend. And never mind the defection news, Anderson managed to rather annoy members of the media this morning after admitting that he had been ‘throwing you lot off the scent’ after he had initially denied he was joining Reform. Asked why he had lied, he responded: ‘That’s politics, darling.’ Ever the charmer…

The controversy-prone politician staged a chummy performance with Reform’s leader Richard Tice at the party press conference this morning — but their relationship hasn’t always been rosy either. Mr S would be interested to know whether the men have patched up some of their previous disagreements…

‘Amateur’ party

A row broke out in November when Anderson told activists that ‘a political party that begins with an R’ offered him ‘a lot of money to join them’. Anderson insisted he had been offered a ‘guaranteed’ job at £80,000 a year for five years if he defected to Reform. But his curious claim was fiercely rejected by Tice, who told the BBC that no ‘cash or money’ had been offered.

‘What’s really happened here is that Lee Anderson has used the threat of defecting to Reform to negotiate himself the deputy chairmanship of the Tory party,’ fumed Tice, who also told the Sunday Times that ‘desperate Tories will make desperate lies to save their skin’. The Ashfield MP hit back, raging that ‘to falsely claim that I used [the offer] as leverage to get the position of deputy chairman is an insult to me and my party’. Anderson added that Tice needed to ‘keep better control of his party, otherwise incidents like this just make them look like amateur’. Ouch.

‘Pound shop’ politicians

The politicians clashed again in January when Anderson dubbed Tice a ‘pound shop Nigel Farage’. The ex-Tory slammed Tice for his attacks on the government, requesting in his typically direct manner that the Reform leader ‘pipe down’. Adding insult to injury, Anderson went on to assert that Tice ‘is coming across as Reform’s answer to Diane Abbott’.

Tice was fast on the attack, remarking scathingly:

Lee…is terrified that he’s going to lose his seat… Perhaps he’s just a bit jealous that I’m pound shop, and he’s 30p Lee.

Burn…

Tory threat

In a GB News discussion that now seems a little, er, jarring, the Ashfield MP warned viewers in January that Reform is a ‘bigger threat’ to the Tories than Labour — and could even help Starmer win the election.

Issuing a characteristically blunt warning to Tice’s party, Anderson took to the airwaves to discourage its meddling ways:

If Reform pick off a lot of Conservatives at the next election we will end up with a Labour government.

And I am sure Nigel in his heart of hearts loves this country — in fact I know he does — but he runs the risk of losing a lot of Tory seats, seats like mine, to put some Labour Remainers, Remoaners, back in power.

Later in the month, the MP told the Sun on Sunday that his advice for rebel Tories was to ‘stick with Rishi’. He added that the general election is ‘a binary choice between us and the Labour Party.’ When asked what the alternative to Sunak might be, Anderson said simply: ‘Lose.’

How the tables turn…