Conservative deputy chairman Lee Anderson has dismissed suggestions the party is a “sinking ship” despite an exodus of sitting MPs ahead of the next election.
Speaking on Nadine Dorries’ new weekly hour-long programme on TalkTV, titled Friday Night With Nadine, Anderson was asked by Boris Johnson’s sister Rachel, a guest on the show, whether he felt like a “rat that’s jumped on a sinking ship”, after swapping parties.
Anderson served as a Labour councillor in Ashfield before defecting to the Conservatives in 2019.
Anderson said: “I don’t feel like I have jumped on the sinking ship.”
He explained: “I look at the Labour Party and the few Lib Dems in there and they scare me to death and I think to myself, my goodness, you know, in 18 months’ time, they could be another 100 of that lot sat there running our country – well they’d be on the other side obviously – and that terrifies me.
“The talent pool within the Labour Party, you know the front bench and the parliamentary party is awful.”
He later added: “I keep hearing this saying that divided parties can’t win elections. I mean, I’ll take you back to John Major. I’m pretty sure the Tory party was fairly divided at that point and they went on to win elections.”
Dorries herself is one of 19 Tory MPs to announce they will not be standing at the next election. Others include Matt Hancock, Sajid Javid and Dehenna Davison.
Announcing her decision on her show last week, the former cabinet minister and staunch ally of ex-PM Johnson said she had made the decision after “much soul searching” and as a result of the Conservatives’ plummeting poll ratings.
The outspoken MP for Ashfield was given his new senior post, working as one of new chairman Greg Hands’s lieutenants in the run-up to the next election, by prime minister Rishi Sunak during the recent reshuffle and Whitehall shake-up.
On the show, Dorries suggested a “little titchy bounce in the polls this week” was down to him. A poll by Redfield & Wilton Strategies had Labour on 41% in the 42 seats won by the Tories at the past three general elections, with the Tories trailling on 34%. The gap has narrowed by three percentage points since the pollster’s last survey in January.
Anderson replied that he was “not sure it can be attributed to me, Nadine, to be honest”, but that maybe his promotion was “a little bit of good news” for so-called Red Wall voters who had switched to the Tories in Labour’s traditional heartlands.
He added: “I don’t want to credit all the three percent to me. I think we’ve steadied the ship quite a bit over the past few weeks.”
Anderson also doubled down on bringing back the death penalty, arguing the position is not “some lunatic fringe view”. However, he did acknowledge “it’s never going to be government policy”.
In an interview with The Spectator magazine a few days before his appointment, Anderson said he would support the UK reintroducing the death penalty, forcing the prime minister to note that neither he, nor the government, shared his view.