The snobbery of Lee Anderson’s critics

The middle-class left cracks me up. They’re always wringing their hands over the lack of working-class people in politics. And yet the minute a man from a working-class background – a former miner, no less – starts to soar in the political realm, they launch a hate campaign against him. They brand him thick, an imbecile, a Rottweiler, a piece of gammon. ‘What’s this gruff, ill-educated blowhard doing on our turf?’, they essentially say. It seems they like the idea of working-class people, but not the reality.

Of course I’m talking about Lee Anderson, the colourful, outspoken Tory MP for Ashfield. He’s become the bete noire of the university-educated left. Virtually every day there’s a Twittermob of the plummy and right-on denouncing Anderson for some speechcrime or other. Today they’re up in arms over comments he made in this magazine about the death penalty: ‘Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed’, he said.