DAN HODGES: Plain-speaking Lee Anderson has exposed our metropolitan elite as being out-of-touch

The boss of the top London PR consultancy was pulling no punches. ‘Lee Anderson is a neanderthal Northerner,’ he raged at the man appointed last week as the Tory Party’s new deputy chairman.

The Lib Dems‘ Treasury spokeswoman Sarah Olney was equally direct. ‘It is not good enough to say we have to have a range of voices in Parliament,’ she haughtily proclaimed after another Tory MP had suggested MPs might perhaps be allowed to reflect the views of their constituents.

Labour’s Lisa Nandy, the Shadow Levelling-Up Secretary, went further, comparing Anderson’s elevation with her party’s management of ‘the scourge of antisemitism’. ‘We kicked them out,’ she chided. ‘You’re promoting people.’

Anderson, the plain-speaking former Labour councillor who represents a Red Wall swing seat in Nottinghamshire, has been in his new post for less than a week. But he’s already done his job.

He’s flushed out the liberal Left. He’s exposed their thinly disguised hatred for anyone who dares challenge their self-styled ‘progressive’ consensus. And, most significantly, he’s revealed how the rise of ‘cancel culture’ is set to ostracise huge swathes of the British working class.

Take Nandy’s comments. First, her claim is false. The majority of Labour MPs – including Sir Keir Starmer – did not initially purge antisemitism from their ranks.

Instead, they chose to tolerate it, appease it, and campaign for it to be transplanted into the heart of government through the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister.

But then look deeper at what Nandy is implying. The outrage that greeted Anderson’s appointment had two primary focal points.

The first was a speech in which he highlighted a food bank scheme in his constituency which requires participants to register for a budgeting and cooking course. ‘We’ve got generation after generation who cannot cook properly, they can’t cook a meal from scratch, they cannot budget,’ he claimed.

The second trigger point was an interview in which he was asked if he backed the restoration of hanging. ‘Yes. Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed. You know that, don’t you? 100 per cent success rate,’ he replied.

Advocating working people should be given the skills required to cook and budget. Arguing for capital punishment for the most serious offenders. This – in the view of Nandy and her party – is equivalent to antisemitism. And should be sanctioned accordingly.

The comparison is obviously ridiculous. And indeed, odious to the millions who share Anderson’s views. But whenever this is pointed out, his critics reach for the same formulaic riposte.

‘Saying all working-class people identify with Lee Anderson is grossly patronising,’ they argue. ‘Not everyone north of Watford wants to hang people or blame the poor for their own poverty.’

And if that’s what Anderson or anyone else was claiming, they’d be right. The fact is that the phrase ‘working class’ is of itself patronising. It assigns homogeneity to a vast and diverse social grouping.

A nurse from Peckham and a plumber from Hartlepool are both working class. Yet their world view will be different in myriad ways.

But unpalatable though it may be to his enemies, Anderson speaks for a sizeable proportion of working people.

According to the most recent YouGov polling, 55 per cent of those questioned support a reintroduction of the death penalty in cases of multiple murder; 54 per cent for terrorist acts of murder; 52 per cent for the murder of a child. So if it is deemed that Anderson – and by extension those who share his views – ‘have no place in mainstream politics’, where do the liberal guardians of public morality think they’ll end up?

We know. In the polling booth voting for Brexit. Or for a latter-day Nick Griffin of the British National Party. Or a Donald Trump.

At which point, those same custodians of progressive virtue will clasp their pearls, throw back their heads and scream: ‘How did this happen?!? How did we get here!?! What have we become?!’

Some on the Left have cynically welcomed Anderson’s appointment. They believe it’s only a matter of time before his plain-speaking crosses into gross political indecency, at which point Rishi Sunak would be forced into another humiliating U-turn and have to sack him.

Similarly, there are some on the Right who see a silver-haired knight galloping over the horizon. They think Anderson could be the man to finally turn the electoral tide back in the Tories’ favour.

Both factions are set to be disappointed.

His appointment was personally approved by Sunak and, as a result, he is likely to be kept on a relatively tight leash.

‘Lee’s going to be given licence to be himself up to a point,’ a Minister told me, ‘but the deal is that he has to make sure he backs Rishi’s five key pledges. He can wander off the reservation a bit but he has to be back in the tepee by nine.’

The reality is that Anderson is likely to become Sunak’s Sarah Palin, the Right-wing ideologue chosen by Republican candidate John McCain in his unsuccessful 2008 US Presidential bid.

Anderson’s appointment will cause an initial flurry of excitement and angst.

He will appeal to, and reassure, elements of the Tory base that have become disillusioned with the PM’s spreadsheet managerialism. But in the end, his strategic impact on the outcome of the next General Election is likely to be negligible.

At which point the liberal Left will make another fatal miscalculation.

On Thursday, Labour retained the safe seat of West Lancashire with a ten per cent swing from the Tories. The result was broadly aligned with national polling showing the Government is on course for electoral annihilation.

And if that annihilation duly arrives, the progressives will use the moment to dance gleefully on the graves of Anderson and his supporters. They will see a Labour landslide as a repudiation of those voters who heard an echo of themselves in the Tory deputy chairman’s plain-speaking. A rejection of those who saw merit in his advocacy of working-class self- sufficiency. A final, decisive rebuff to those uncouth enough to want to see child-killers hang.

Then they will pat themselves on the back and turn away. Turn away, in other words, from half of the people of Britain.

Anderson is fighting a losing battle. His Government is facing a cost-of-living crisis, the highest tax burden since the war, industrial strife, austerity and an NHS in crisis. Sunak could have appointed the Lord Almighty (He/Him) as deputy chairman and it would be unlikely to save his party.

But Anderson has at least managed to tear the mask away. The antipathy. The snobbery. The simmering contempt so-called progressives have for anyone who dares question their right to dictate the values of today’s Britain.

For now, Anderson can be ridiculed as a ‘neanderthal Northerner’ with relative impunity. But his abusers may want to pause and reflect on whether such language is ultimately going to benefit their case or cause.

Because if they genuinely want to force Anderson – and the countless many he speaks for – out of the political mainstream, there is no majority Starmer can secure that will be big enough to shield them from what comes next.