Who is the worst man in Britain? According to the Daily Mirror, it’s the 56-year-old former coal miner and Tory MP Lee Anderson, who clinched the award a year ago after criticising England’s footballers for ‘taking the knee’. How did Anderson, who this week was appointed Deputy Chairman of the Tory party, respond to the accolade? ‘I immediately rang my parents to thank them for all their support. It’s the first time anyone from my family has been voted the worst man in Britain, so I tried to win it two years on the trot.’
Since his election in December 2019, Anderson has emerged as the pugnacious ambassador for the Red Wall intake of Conservative MPs. He is, like his Ashfield constituency, a Tory convert, having served as a Labour councillor until a year before his election. While many well-heeled Tories shy away from cost-of-living issues, Anderson relishes the debate, arguing that anyone earning over £30,000 but using food banks ‘must have a budgeting problem’. He won the nickname ‘30p Lee’ after he claimed that £50 could be used to produce 172 meals and feed a family of five for a week.
We meet a few days before his appointment, when Anderson is still a backbencher. In a parliament increasingly dominated by middle-class professionals, Anderson says he can speak plainly about food banks and other issues, given his own life experience. ‘I can say it because I was a single parent for 17 years with two boys. I struggled. I know what it’s like to put your last fiver in the gas meter. I know what it’s like to have to sell your car because you can’t afford to run it – so I’ll take no lectures from anybody about being hard up and struggling for survival.’
He spent a decade working at the Citizens Advice Bureau, where he says he saw one family claim the equivalent of £70,000 in benefits.
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