Embattled UK leader Rishi Sunak suffered a new blow Monday when a former ally defected to a right-wing populist party, raising concerns among the ruling Conservatives ahead of this year’s general election.
Lee Anderson announced his decision to join Reform UK, weeks after being suspended from Sunak’s Conservative Party for comments widely condemned as racist and Islamophobic.
The 57-year-old former Tory deputy chair became the first MP to represent Reform, whose honorary president is Nigel Farage, an arch-eurosceptic and Brexit campaigner.
The fringe party is now polling at approximately 10% in opinion polls, which if reproduced in the election could split the right-wing support in important constituencies.
That would make it even more difficult for the Conservatives, who have been in office since 2010, to hold off a revived major opposition Labour Party, which is presently leading national polls.
To mitigate Reform’s influence, Sunak could move his party further to the right, continuing a decades-long tendency that has escalated since the 2016 referendum on leaving the EU.
However, doing so runs the risk of alienating more liberal voters.
Anderson is an MP in the “Red Wall” constituency of working-class people in northern England, which is critical to both the Conservatives’ and Labour’s chances of winning the election.
The seats were once Labour strongholds before ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson flipped them for the Conservatives following his landslide victory in the 2019 election on a vow to “get Brexit done”.
The New Conservatives, a group of Tory MPs on the right who have rebelled against Sunak, claimed responsibility for Anderson’s defection.
“We cannot pretend any longer that ‘the plan is working’. We need to change course urgently,” the group said in a statement.
Populist
Reform opposes immigration, net-zero energy plans, and what it terms excessive “nanny state” government regulations, and its members frequently applaud former US President Donald Trump.
“I want my country back,” Anderson told reporters in London, announcing his defection.
He was widely expected to join Reform after being suspended from the Conservatives’ parliamentary party in February for refusing to apologise for claiming London’s Labour mayor Sadiq Khan was controlled by Islamists.
“Anderson’s defection does highlight the ongoing electoral problem facing Rishi Sunak, with attacks coming from the left and right,” said Emma Levin of the polling firm Savanta.
However, she noted that the action “will likely mean very little in national polling terms”.
“Lee Anderson’s name recognition among the wider public is low, and if voters are aware of him, it is probably because they saw (and disagreed) with his comments that led to his suspension from the Conservative party,” Levin said in a statement.
In the United Kingdom, if an MP changes party affiliation, a by-election is not automatically called; instead, they may opt to step down and run for re-election under their new allegiance or independently.
Sunak has yet to declare the date of the general election, but says it will take place in the second half of the year.