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Lee Anderson has been suspended by the Tories after he refused to apologise for claiming Islamists have “got control of” Sadiq Khan.
The party’s former deputy chairman was stripped of the Conservative whip following a furious political backlash to his comments.
Appearing on GB News on Friday afternoon, Anderson said the London mayor, who is Muslim, had “given our capital city away to his mates”.
Khan described the remarks as “Islamophobic, anti-Muslim and racist”, while senior Tories also condemned them.
Conservative officials initially tried to defend Anderson, with a party source telling HuffPost UK he “was simply making the point that the mayor … has abjectly failed to get a grip on the appalling Islamist marches we have seen in London recently”.
But this afternoon, a spokesperson for chief whip Simon Hart said: “Following his refusal to apologise for comments made yesterday, the chief whip has suspended the Conservative whip from Lee Anderson.”
The Ashfield MP later said he accepted the party “had no option” but to take the whip off him.
He said: “Following a call with the chief whip, I understand the difficult position that I have put both he and the prime minister in with regard to my comments.
“I fully accept that they had no option but to suspend the whip in these circumstances.
“However, I will continue to support the government’s efforts to call out extremism in all its forms – be that anti-semitism or Islamophobia.”
It is a dramatic fall from grace for Anderson, who was still one of the Tories’ deputy chairs last month.
He and party colleague Brendan Clarke-Smith quit so they could rebel over Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda bill.
Just a week later, he said he should have voted for the bill and wanted his old job back.
Responding to the news that he had lost the Tory whip, Labour chair Anneliese Dodds said: “Lee Anderson’s comments were unambiguously Islamophobic, divisive and damaging.
“It is right that he has had the whip removed, but the suggestion that Lee Anderson would have retained the confidence of the prime minister, simply if he apologised, is deeply concerning.
“These views are wrong, full stop, and there shouldn’t be conditions on removing them from your party.”
Dodds also repeated Labour’s call for Liz Truss to also lose the Tory whip over comments she made at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington DC.
The former prime minister claimed the Financial Times was “friends of the deep state”, which had worked to bring her time in Downing Street to an end.
Dodds said: “Labour is calling on the prime minister to also remove the whip from Liz Truss for her egregious and embarrassing comments about our country on the international stage and if he doesn’t then he is not serious about ridding the Conservatives of radical and dangerous views.”
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