Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson says he’s not on some lunatic fringe for wanting to bring back the death penalty.
The blunt MP for Ashfield said he’s entitled to have opinions after backlash to comments declaring capital punishment has a 100 per cent success rate.
Mr Anderson was given the post by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in his reshuffle last week.
In an interview with The Spectator magazine a few days before his appointment, he said he would support the United Kingdom reintroducing the death penalty.
The Prime Minister was forced to distance himself from the comments to confirm that neither he nor the Government, shared his view.
Talking on Nadine Dorries’ TalkTV programme with Nadine, Mr Anderson doubled down on some of his controversial assertions, insisting bringing back the death penalty wasn’t some lunatic fringe view. However, he did admit that it was never going to be Government policy.
He said that it wasn’t a big surprise to his constituents and that he wasn’t all of a sudden coming out saying that he supports the death penalty and that this was an opinion that he’s always held since being a teenager, but that it wasn’t some lunatic fringe view.
And he claimed the policy was even backed by 52 per cent of the country and millions of Conservative voters, and that he knew that this was never going to happen, it was never going to be Government policy, and it would never get through Parliament.
He said that he was entitled to have opinions, even if there were some people in his own party in Parliament that didn’t agree with them.
Asked by Boris Johnson’s sister Rachel, a guest on the show, whether he felt like a rat that had jumped on a sinking ship, after switching sides in Parliament, Mr Anderson said that he didn’t feel like he’d jumped on the sinking ship.
Mr Anderson served as a Labour councillor in Ashfield before defecting to the Conservatives in 2019.
The now-Tory MP has been dubbed ’30p Lee’ for claiming that meals could be prepared for that sum and suggesting people using food banks couldn’t budget.
In 2021, when the men’s Euro 2020 football match was taking place, he promised to boycott England games in protest against the players’ anti-racism stance of taking a knee before matches.
He says that he’s not a lunatic, although he protests too much, and he’s not a very pleasant man, although it appears that all the Tories are horrible because how often have the Tories sentenced to death with austerity and cuts?
He said that he’s not a lunatic, but we know precisely what he is, he’s a bog standard, ten a penny, lying, money-grabbing Tory opportunist of the worst kind, and it’s fairly evident that the Tories are in a total dilemma. All their major policies have failed, Brexit has been a catastrophe, they messed up over the pandemic, and now they’ve become pathetic. Although, Brexit wasn’t a Tory policy per se. David Cameron was the prime minister at the time. It was voted in by the British people, but the idea was put there by Government.
Let’s face it if you put something in the minds of people enough times, they will start to believe it, it’s called the illusionary effect.
Perhaps he’s been given the position to be a lightning rod for the Tories? Because while he’s playing the doofus, attention is being taken away from the rest of the Tory party, and they get away with all sorts while attention is diverted.
This will inevitably go to his already enormous ego, and he might even start chucking his weight around, although he’s probably not very popular with the backbenchers, and I really can’t see him lasting long.
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