Four weeks ago, Rishi Sunak was hoping he could find a way to return Lee Anderson to his job as the deputy chair of the Conservative party after Anderson’s resignation over the Rwanda bill, with the prime minister’s spokesperson letting it be known he still had “a lot of time for Lee”. He’s certainly spending a lot of time on him. A mere month on, Sunak seems to be hoping he can find a way to persuade Lee Anderson to return to the Conservative party. Meanwhile much of public life seems to be moving in a fast and febrile way at the moment, and a lot of people are rightly worried where it will end.
While the de-whipped Anderson flirts with joining Reform, Sunak’s appeasing position is that this celebrated “red wall”-whisperer’s comments about Sadiq Khan were “wrong” but not Islamophobic. By way of a reminder, Anderson used a GB News appearance to assert that “Islamists” had control of London and the London mayor had given the capital to “his mates”. No politician should speak like this. But by being utterly unable to say why the remarks were “wrong”, the electorally desperate Sunak gives the impression he’d like to have Lee back, not speaking exactly like this, but a bit like this, in fact, quite like this, not that we’d all say it in the same way, and, you know … Lee is Lee!
