Lee Anderson.

Anderson attracted significant negative press in October 2025 after telling the Telegraph that he had deliberately placed people on benefits fraudulently, framing it as "gaming the system." That admission drew sustained criticism of his integrity and sits awkwardly alongside his rhetorical posture as a Reform MP. More recently, a teacher publicly branded him "pathetic" after he made derogatory remarks about pupils and the profession in response to constituent criticism — coverage that averaged a negative sentiment score across his last 90 days of press. Against that, local outlet the Mansfield and Ashfield Chad credited him with 816 parliamentary questions, 107 speeches, and 25,000-plus constituent contacts in 2025, alongside claims of £62.6m in investment secured for Ashfield during the previous Parliament.

His participation rate of 58% sits below the Commons average, but when he does vote, he is a 99.1% party-line voter — one of Reform's most loyal members. His most notable deviations are telling: he voted for the Railways Bill at Second Reading, backing public rail ownership at a rate 41 percentage points above his party's average, and he voted for the assisted dying bill, placing him 25 points below Reform's typical position. He also backed the proportional representation motion in late 2024. His speeches cluster heavily around crime, jobs, immigration, and social care — topics consistent with a red-wall seat where he has held on through two elections and a party defection.

Anderson was first elected for the Conservatives in 2019, defected to Reform in February 2024, and sits on the Speaker's Conference on electoral matters. His stance profile shows near-zero alignment with progressive taxation and workers' rights positions, strong alignment with anti-tax and parliamentary scrutiny stances, and unusually high pro-welfare-expansion scores (71%) relative to Reform's average. Parliamentary questions data covers from 2019; voting data reflects his full career.