By Sascha O'Sullivan
Rishi Sunak has dug a line in the sand on culture war issues, but it’s already created new ideological division which could split the Conservative Party, writes Eliot Wilson
You may not have heard of Iain Anderson, whose name made it into most newspapers last week. The executive chairman of PR shop Cicero, which represents companies from BAT to Serco, hit the headlines because, after a lifetime as a middle-of-the-road Tory, he recanted his faith: he announced he will vote Labour at the next election. This comes after 39 years in the Conservative Party, rising to be Boris Johnson’s LGBT business champion.
Anderson is not an obvious blood-red radical. A product of Aberdeen’s venerable, fee-paying Robert Gordon’s College, where he was friends with Michael Gove, and the University of St Andrews, then the beating heart of the New Right, he’s a freeman of the City of London. Less than three years ago he was back in a classroom of his alma mater, inspiring pupils with an invocation of World War 2’s “Greatest Generation”. He’s also a Thatcherite who once proclaimed “She will always be Maggie to me… she changed our world”. You would imagine his very blood runs Conservative blue.
And yet, he did make this momentous step, this crossing of the political Tiber. Anderson claims it began with the party’s relationship with big business. He was concerned by Boris Johnson’s outburst of “f**k business” as foreign secretary in 2018, but accepted his post as LGBT business champion from the same man when prime minister three years later. The appointment set him to work under the equalities minister, his friend Liz Truss.
That role provided the apparent pivot for him. Last April, he resigned from the unpaid advisory post because of Johnson’s support for women-only spaces, restrictions on trans athletes competing against biological women and the government’s failure to proceed with a ban on “conversion therapy”. He felt things had changed, and could not support “politics which creates dividing lines”.
Later that year, he took up the post of chairman of Stonewall.
The last straw for Anderson, he relates, was Rishi Sunak’s decision to make the culture wars a central plank of the Conservative offering at the next general election. “It was made pretty clear the plan is to run a culture war to distract from fundamental economic failings”, Anderson told the media. “It’s not something I want any part of.” Tories have suggested privately he was furious at the government’s decision to block the Scottish Parliament’s Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, which would have made it easier in Scotland to obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate as another sex.
As for the Labour Party, they were delighted to welcome an example of what they called “serious business people” among their ranks. Tory insiders evinced little surprise, and responded curtly “We wish him well”. It still seems difficult to capture a mindset willing to accept a sensitive appointment on LGBT issues in 2021 who then found the government’s attitude intolerably prejudiced only a year later.
Anderson has always courted a public role. In 2021, when his favoured government was in power, he posted jolly selfies outside the black door of Number 10 Downing Street four times. He has appeared on the BBC’s trial-by-ordeal, Question Time. And he must have known, when he took his role at Stonewall, that he was stepping into a fiercely public arena.
In a period of politics as charged as this, everyone is looking for the canary in the mine, the sure signal of which way the next election will go.
Nervousness remains in the Labour Party, who are approaching their fourteenth year out of office, despite very encouraging opinion polls.
Perhaps Anderson is not the canary. One should always, like Good Queen Bess, hesitate to make windows into men’s souls. Consistency is sometimes the hobgoblin of little minds. In one sense, given the nature of the breach, one might hope for his sake that the light Anderson has seen is the end of the tunnel, and not the sleeper to Aberdeen.
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