Who knows where Lee Anderson’s ‘political journey’ will take him – but it’s the end for Rishi Sunak

As the Conservative Party’s former deputy chair threatens to defect, he leaves the PM looking ever weaker – and his erstwhile colleagues acting as if they're already in opposition, says Sean O’Grady

Rishi Sunak with the GB News host and now-suspended MP Lee Anderson (PA)

During his latest “exclusive” interview with GB News (well, they do pay him £100,000 a year for this sort of stuff), Lee Anderson, currently ex-Tory MP for Ashfield, said that he’d been on a political journey.

That’s true. A few years ago, he was a Labour councillor and office manager to the then Labour MP for Ashfield, Gloria De Piero (who, oddly enough, also washed up on the shores of GB News as a presenter). He’d been on the Bennite left of Labour for all that time, and in 2017 was happy to campaign for Jeremy Corbyn to be prime minister. The first time he voted Conservative was in the 2019 “get Brexit done” election, when he was elected as a Conservative MP.

Like a few other seats, notably Sedgefield, previously represented by Tony Blair, it was a symbolic breakthrough in the so-called red wall – the defection of the working class to Boris Johnson’s Tory populism (and its, shall we say, overambitious promises about levelling up).