In the early 2020s, the darling of members of the British Conservative Party was called Jacob Rees-Mogg. This Minister of State of Boris Johnson then Secretary of State of Liz Truss, mannered diction and impeccable costumes, snob to the point of caricature, had a full house every time he spoke. The new darling of Tory activists absolutely does not have the same profile.
At 56, Lee Anderson, MP for Ashfield (in the Midlands) and vice-president of the party, is an authentic representative of the working class who has never set foot in university, unlike the Conservative hierarchy. , almost all passed through Oxford or Cambridge. Son and grandson of miners, he himself worked for ten years in the coal mines, shortly before their final closure in the 1990s.
A Labor municipal councilor until 2018, he suddenly defected to the Tories, then was elected MP for his hometown during the general elections at the end of 2019. His journey perfectly embodies that of tens of thousands of residents of the center and the north of England, left behind by deindustrialization who, at the same time as him, turned away from their traditional left-wing affiliations, seduced by Brexit and Boris Johnson’s investment promises.
“I remember a door-to-door session in Ashfield in 2017 with the Labor MP [qu’il a remplacée en 2019]. One guy refused to say who he was going to vote for. By discussing, we realized that we [avait] worked in the same mine. He then told me that he was voting Tory because, thanks to Margaret Thatcher, he had been able to buy the house where he lived. [la Dame de fer a lancé, dans les années 1980, une opération de rachat de son logement social à prix abordable]. Thanks to her, his life had meaning, because he had something to give up to his children. I found his story moving, it was my road to Damascus,” he told a delighted audience at the Conservative Party’s annual conference in Manchester at the beginning of October.
Extroverted and goofy
The former miner, who assures that he does not blame “Maggie” for not having prevented the closure of the mines in the 1980s (“in any case, they were doomed”), crossed the Rubicon a few months later, when, according to him, a Labor colleague provoked him: “He told me that if I had never opened The capital, of Marx, I just had to go see the Tories. I replied: “Good idea!” “, he added in Manchester. The truth is that he had just been suspended from Labor for having, on his own initiative, blocked access to land for “travelers”.
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