Lee Anderson, who previously said the Tories needed to fight the election on “trans debate and culture wars”, has been elected as an MP for Reform UK.

Anderson, who joined the Conservatives from Labour in 2018 and then defected to Nigel Farage‘s party in March, won the Ashfield seat with 17,062 votes.

If the exit poll is correct, it could be the first of 13 seats won by Reform UK amid Labour’s predicted landslide victory.

Back in February 2023, when Anderson was still a Tory MP, he said in order to win the next general election the Conservatives needed to fight it on “mix of culture wars and trans debate”.

Speaking with The New Culture Form he said the party relied on Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn to win votes in 2019 but would not hold those cards for the next general election. 

“The big thing in terms of 2019, there were three things that won us the election. It was nothing to do with me. It was Brexit, it was Boris, it was Corbyn and it was as simple as that,” he said at the time, “Those three things together were a great campaign, great ingredients.”

He went on to say the Tories will “probably” rely on a “mix of culture wars and trans debate”. 

During the course of this general election, that was not untrue with Keir Starmer accusing Rishi Sunak of using trans rights as a “political football to divide people”.

In the run up to the election, Reform UK campaigners were caught using homophobic and racist slurs.

Channel 4, which went undercover within the Reform campaign in Clacton in June, revealed that a canvasser had made racist and Islamophobic comments to potential voters in the Essex constituency. 

A Reform canvasser named Andrew Parker described Sunak as a “f**king p***” while George Jones, who runs events for Reform, was caught on camera calling a Pride flag displayed on a police car a “f**king degenerate flag”.