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**Hugh** · 26-11-2023, 08:43

Quote:

Lee Anderson: I was offered ‘a lot of money’ to join Reform UK

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/7...08b21b778e87d1

Quote:

The Conservative Party deputy chairman, Lee Anderson, has been secretly recorded claiming that he was offered “a lot of money” to defect to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party.

Anderson, 56, made the comments at 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 revealed that he had been approached to defect to Reform UK.

Anderson told activists at the gathering: “Now there is a political party that begins with an R that offered me a lot of money to join them. I say a lot of money, I mean a lot of money.”..

… But the Conservative Party revealed last night that Anderson told Simon Hart, the chief whip, in February this year that he had been offered money by Reform UK — previously known as the Brexit party and founded with support from Farage in 2018 — to defect.

Hart met the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, to inform him that senior Tory MPs were being offered £400,000-plus “bribes” to defect to Reform UK, which the party believed may be against electoral law. The chief whip claimed the offers were based on an agreement that if MPs joined Reform UK they would be guaranteed to receive up to five years of their MP’s salary if they lost their seat after defecting. MPs’ pay increased to £86,584 in April, making five years’ salary worth about £430,000.