What are we to make of the Lee Anderson saga? The very fact that this low-rent furore is dominating our Sunday political discourse speaks volumes. At the end of a week which saw the Commons change its procedures in a bid to placate the threat posed by a mixed bag of Islamist and Corbynista pro-Palestine ultras, the political media has found a compelling talking point with which to divert our attention.
Rather than address the fundamental issue – that the Leader of the Opposition and the Commons Speaker gave ground to the mob – here we are agonising about whether Rishi Sunak acted swiftly or harshly enough against his most notorious backbench blowhard. Or perhaps whether he was too swift and too harsh. This reminds me of the big issue that came out of the Islamist assassination of Sir David Amess: not how we remove the cancer of this extremism from our society, but why MPs need to be kinder to each other and why hurtful words on social media should be banned.
This party no longer works as a vote-winning vehicle
Clearly Anderson was engaging in hyperbole when he told a GB News audience that both Sadiq Khan and Sir Keir Starmer were ‘controlled by Islamists’.
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