Pro-death penalty Lee Anderson is causing outrage – and the Tories are delighted

What can the Conservatives offer Red Wall voters at the next general election? Brexit is now complete and its dividends have been depressingly slow in coming. Boris Johnson, who assembled the extraordinary coalition of voters, has gone. As has Jeremy Corbyn, whom they united against. The “levelling up” agenda has not progressed much beyond soundbite. If today’s polls were tomorrow’s election result, Rishi Sunak would lose almost every single seat in the north of England with his party facing its worst defeat in a century.

This is the background against which Lee Anderson has been promoted to Tory deputy chairman. A Red Wall MP who was a Labour councillor until a few years ago, he has own distinct view of the world and shared it with The Spectator a few days before his promotion. The death penalty, he says, should come back. Who can deny that it’s 100 per cent effective at stopping reoffending? Few of his fellow Tory MPs agree, but few regret that he said it. It’s a view shared by about 40 per cent of the country and 59 per cent of Brexiteers.

Anderson has plenty more opinions where those came from. If a nurse or anyone else on an above-average salary is using a food bank, he says, they must have budgeting problems. Illegal migrants? Have the Royal Navy return them to France. And welfare is far too generous to those who can work – a system now being exploited by people who can work, but choose not to. He refers to Westminster as “that place”. And his political gameplan? To tour Britain with his Red Wall candour: Bournemouth, Chipping Norton, Halifax, Taunton. Tory members, it seems, cannot get enough of him.

Sunak can hardly claim to be shocked by the cask-strength views of his new deputy chairman: indeed, Anderson’s reputation explains his appointment. He’s the perfect lightning conductor. The Prime Minister is a workaholic teetotaller, a former banker whose ideal day involves a 7am spin class followed by deskwork. His new party chairman, Greg Hands, is a fellow millionaire financier. Neither have any love of Westminster theatrics. Now both have, in Anderson, a rough-edged human dynamo of political cabaret.

“Boring is back,” Michael Gove declared when Sunak became Prime Minister, but boring never wins. Politics abhors a vacuum and there will always be someone, somewhere, saying something interesting – or appalling. In a 24/7 news environment, the ability to start a debate carries great political power. Donald Trump controlled the news with his Twitter account, with comments designed to cause outrage. His critics took the bait, every single time. By making him the centre of conversation, they played into his hands.

The trick of being a political controversialist is to find positions which will elicit squeals of outrage from your opponents but carry mass public support. Building a wall with Mexico, banning travel from failed (Muslim-majority) states: much of what Trump proposed had huge popular support. The more that his enemies deplored him for holding opinions shared by about half of Americans, the more they sent an unintended message: “He’s on your side and we’re not.” Anderson shares a similar view: “I’m of the mind that half the population will hate you, whatever colour you wear.”

Boris Johnson, too, can dominate the national conversation. When he wrote in these pages that women who wore the niqab looked like letterboxes, he ended up investigated for Islamophobia by his own party. But his target voters knew it was a joke – and one that could hardly be anti-Muslim, given that the niqab is banned in several Muslim countries. To be attacked for espousing a widely shared position is the greatest gift that a politician’s opponents can bestow upon him. If the offending comment can be delivered with a bit of humour (Anderson’s speciality) then so much the better.

This dynamic has been going on for years, incubated by the asylum of social media. A comment is dropped in, a controversy whipped up and then television dutifully spits it out. As Trump realised, this news-entertainment machine badly needs villains, outrage and talking points. There was no real room for Anderson when Boris Johnson was the main bad guy or while the economic witch trial of Liz Truss was taking place. But now they have vanished, who will take the stage of this political vaudeville?

Hence the logic in Anderson’s appointment. In a world of political automatons – “non-playable characters” as my children’s generation call them – he’s genuinely box office. He’s a former coal miner: how many MPs are from manual labour backgrounds? He’s a single parent who worked at Citizens Advice and (as he says) “knows how it feels to put your last fiver in the gas meter”. How many politicians can say the same? And he just happens to have a suite of opinions that will have his opponents railing for months. If they take the bait.

In the Cameron era, Anderson might have been disciplined for Faragiste populism. But the Tories are heading for a landslide defeat and are desperate for a message for Red Wall voters on whom they depend for survival. Anderson will help Tories say: “We share your patriotic values, Starmer disdains them.” Penny Mordaunt, leader of the House of Commons, was trying out a version of this in the chamber yesterday. People “refer to him as 30p Lee,” she said. “But his constituents refer to him as ‘he-stands-up-for-me Lee’ ”.

Anderson doesn’t, of course, stand up for Mordaunt or the genteel Sunakites. But they love him – or, at any rate, love that their party seems to have, in him, someone likely to resonate in the Red Wall. Brexiteers are around twice as likely to support capital punishment, sending asylum seekers to Rwanda or to say that welfare payments are too high. So stoking a controversy on such wedge issues, to fight a values-based campaign, may be the best hope Sunak has of keeping this 2019 electoral coalition together.

“If the intelligentsia want to criticise him,” said Nickie Aiken, Anderson’s co-deputy chairman, “they are criticising a huge swathe of his constituents.”

For a party led by a Goldman Sachs and Stanford alumnus to complain about “the intelligentsia” is, of course, richly comic. But these are difficult times, this is a new game and it’s perfectly logical for the Tories to start playing it.