Rishi Sunak has just appointed Lee Anderson as the deputy chair of the Conservative Party – and Twitter can decide if it’s being trolled or not.
The prime minister has reshuffled his cabinet amid a spate of scandals which rocked both the public and his party’s confidence (and Sunak’s standing in the opinion polls was not high to begin with).
With several of his senior ministers making headlines over their ministerial conduct, including home secretary Suella Braverman, former cabinet office minister Gavin Williamson, and most recently former Tory chair, Nadhim Zahawi, Sunak was trying to get his cabinet back on track.
But, he may have overplayed his hand by appointing controversial backbencher Anderson to deputy chair of the Conservative Party.
The MP for Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, is on the Tory-right and was elected in 2019. Despite only a few years in parliament, he has caused a stir repeatedly by asking if so many food banks were really necessary, claiming many relied on the facilities because they “can’t cook a meal from scratch” and cannot “budget”.
He claimed that meals can be cooked from scratch for “about 30p a day”, and even said people called him “30p Lee” by saying he made 172 meals with just £50 in a supermarket.
In January, Anderson criticised nurses for using food banks, saying anyone who needed to use them on salaries of around £30k that must have “something wrong with their finances”.
He also used one of his staff members recently as an example of someone who can budget well very publicly on social media.
Anderson wrote: “She [Katy] is single & earns less than 30k, rents a room for £775pcm in Central London, has student debt, £120 a month on travelling to work saves money every month, goes on foreign holidays & does not need to use a food bank. Katy makes my point really well.”
This opened him up to a whole new category of critics.
And, only last month, he compared Sunak’s government to the “band on the Titanic”, meaning his appointment gave people the perfect opportunity to use the “shuffling the deckchairs” analogy.
Understandably, Twitter can’t quite believe this turn of events....