Lee Anderson has said he is not ruling out defecting to Reform UK, in a move that would give the rightwing populist party its first MP.
Anderson, a former Conservative party deputy chair, who has been suspended from sitting as a Tory MP because of his comments about the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said he had “been on a political journey” when pressed about whether he would join Reform.
“You’ll say Lee Anderson rules out/doesn’t rule out joining the Reform party, so I’m making no comment on my future,” he said in his latest interview with his employer GB News.
When asked if he would be a Conservative candidate at the next election, Anderson said: “That’s not up to me,” but that he would still be standing.
Anderson, who was a deputy Tory chair until last month, was suspended from the party whip on Saturday after he refused to apologise for saying Islamists had “got control of” Khan. Anderson claimed on GB News that the London mayor had “given our capital city away to his mates”. He now sits as the independent MP for Ashfield in Nottinghamshire.
Anderson might not be welcomed by all Reform UK senior figures. The party’s deputy leader, Ben Habib, said on Tuesday that any Tory MP wishing to join would need to explain themselves and the party would need to be sure they were “ideologically sound”.
Anderson’s latest comments came as the home secretary, James Cleverly, called for him to apologise, but like other ministers and Rishi Sunak himself, continued to avoid describing Anderson’s comments as racist or Islamophobic.
On a visit to San Francisco, Cleverly said: “I think Lee should apologise. What he said wasn’t accurate, it wasn’t fair, but the chief whip and the prime minister have made the party position absolutely clear on this.”
Such an apology is unlikely to come, if other comments by Anderson to GB News are anything to go by. He insisted his comments “weren’t racist at all” and added that he would not apologise to Khan “while I have a breath in my body”.
Anderson had some support from the Conservative MP and fellow GB News presenter Jacob Rees-Mogg, who said Anderson’s comments about Khan had been “infelicitous” but he should not have been suspended.
A former special adviser to No 10 on civil society and communities said Anderson’s comments would “stoke more division in our country during what is a very sensitive period”.
Samuel Kasumu, who was an adviser to Boris Johnson when he was prime minister, added on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the prime minister had Muslim colleagues who had expressed their concerns in private and public, and he quoted Martin Luther King: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies.”
The Palestinian ambassador to the UK, Husam Zomlot, also entered the row. A frequent speaker at the near-weekly marches against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, he said: “To paint the most moving act of the British people, the most peaceful, to paint them as Islamists, is Islamophobic anti-Palestinian and anti-British.
“On those protests I saw mothers, grandmothers, Christians, Jewish people, brothers and sisters, and the British people at their best .”
If Sunak had been hoping that the controversy would begin to die down three nights on from from the initial remarks, he is likely to be aghast at the emergence of a potential defection to Reform, which has been causing the Conservatives headaches in byelections and threatens to eat into Tory votes at the general election.
Reform UK’s leader, Richard Tice, has not ruled out opening the door to Anderson after his suspension, and said on Twitter on Tuesday that he would not have removed the whip from Anderson.
“Lee Anderson may have been clumsy in his precise choice of words, but his sentiments are supported by millions of British citizens, including myself,” he said in a statement.
• This article was amended on 27 February 2024. An earlier version said that Lee Anderson’s Ashfield constituency was in Derbyshire instead of Nottinghamshire.
