Lee Anderson has been MP for Ashfield since 2019. He was elected as a Conservative, defected to Reform UK in March 2024 after being suspended from the Conservative whip, and was re elected as the Reform UK MP at the July 2024 general election. Before politics he worked at a coal mine, then for the Citizens Advice Bureau and as a parliamentary aide. He left Labour to join the Conservatives in 2018 and made the second jump to Reform after being suspended from the Conservative whip in 2024 for refusing to retract comments about Sadiq Khan and Islamism.

The biographical claim, working class background and direct manner, is more authentic than most modern MPs can offer. He sounds like the place he comes from. In a parliamentary culture dominated by SpAds and lawyers, that is a real political asset and his constituency has consistently responded to it.

The substance behind the manner is more contested. The "30p meals" episode during the cost of living crisis became a defining political moment because it crystallised a particular criticism: that Anderson speaks the language of working class struggle while making arguments that read, from the outside, like dismissal of the people most affected. Whether that is fair depends on whether you take the budget cooking suggestion as practical advice or as a politician under estimating the gap between his current circumstances and his constituents'.

The bigger material critique is the voting record. Anderson was a Conservative MP through years that delivered visible damage to towns like Ashfield. Austerity, the local authority cuts that closed services in coalfield communities, the welfare reforms that fell hardest on long term sickness and disability. He voted with the government through the cumulative effect of those policies. His current politics, on immigration, on welfare, on Islamism, do not address the parts of the economic argument his own record contributed to.

The move to Reform is consistent with where his politics had been trending. The party is a better fit for his public manner than the post 2019 Conservatives were, and Reform now sits where his voters were already heading. The earlier critique, that Reform is good at identifying the problem and weak on the solution, applies to him as it applies to the party. The campaign register works. The governing programme has not been written.

He generates more media coverage than most backbenchers. Some of this is theatre. Some of it is the genuine fact that he says things that other MPs are too cautious to say, and that journalists can quote without translation. The Conservative Party tolerated him as a useful messenger until his messaging became politically inconvenient. Reform has fewer reasons to manage him.

Anderson's career has so far been a long argument about what working class politics looks like in modern Britain. The argument is real and is not going away. Whether he and his political movement produce anything that actually changes Ashfield, rather than just speaking for it, is the question their voters will eventually answer.