So now we know. If you’re from a working-class background in a Red Wall constituency and you think Islamism is a big problem, the Tories are not the party for you. That’s the takeaway, surely, from Lee Anderson’s flight from the Tories into the welcoming arms of Reform UK following the confected media stink over his brash comments about Sadiq Khan being too cosy with Islamists. The optics of this are awful. A former miner turned Tory MP pipes up about radical Islam and the eye-wateringly wealthy Rishi Sunak effectively kicks him out? Yikes.

This is the news that Anderson, the MP for Ashfield, has defected to Reform UK, the upstart right-wing party led by Richard Tice. It follows his suspension from the Conservative Party last month after he said Islamists have ‘got control’ of London and its mayor, Sadiq Khan. ‘Islamophobe!’, hollered the liberal media. Centrist arseholes and tedious podcasters obsessed over his ‘racist’ comments for days. That Anderson also said Keir Starmer is in the pocket of Islamist loons didn’t help his cause: he was branded a Muslim-basher whose very mention of the word ‘Islamist’ was likely to inflame the bovine bigotries of his fellow Red Wall meatheads.