Lee Anderson has revealed that he was offered “a lot of money” to defect to Reform UK.
The Conservative Party deputy chairman disclosed that he had been approached by Richard Tice’s party during a “Lagers with Lee” meeting at Cambridge Rugby Club last month after saying: “We’re not taping this, are we?”
In the recording of the event, hosted by South Cambridgeshire Conservative Association, the Tory MP for Ashfield said a “political party that begins with an R” offered him “a lot of money to join them”.
“I say a lot of money, I mean a lot of money”, he added.
Anderson, nicknamed ’30p Lee’ owing to comments he made in relation to food banks, is currently earning £100,000 a year for eight hours of work a week on GB News.
At the start of the year, he was handed his own show alongside the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Esther McVey and Philip Davies on the channel.
There has been some nervousness among the Tory ranks about the threat posed by Reform UK at the next election, with the prime minister saying in an interview with the Mail on Sunday: “A vote for everyone who is not a Conservative is a vote to put Keir Starmer into office.
“The question for people who care about tackling migration, who want to get our taxes down, who think we need to have more common sense in our discourse is: do you want Keir Starmer or me to be your prime minister?”
The chief secretary to the Treasury, Laura Trott, also told Sky News this morning that she was not worried about Reform UK outflanking her party.