If "Ben Bradley is Reform's "signing of the season", I'd hate to see who is playing in your reserves…"
Lee Anderson has been mocked for calling former Tory Ben Bradley’s defection to Reform the party’s ‘signing of the season’.
Bradley, who was ousted from his Mansfield seat at the 2024 general election, has joined Reform as their head of local government action at Doge.
In a post on X, Anderson, the Reform MP for Ashfield, reacted to Bradley’s defection calling it the “signing of the season”.
He added: “This is a major coup for us as he has left an extremely well paid job to join our team.”
On social media, many questioned Anderson’s glowing praise for Bradley.
One X user wrote: “If the former Conservative MP and Nottinghamshire County Council leader Ben Bradley is Reform’s “signing of the season”, I’d hate to see who is playing in your reserves…”
Writer and policy advisor Sam Freedman said on Bluesky: “Former Tory MP Ben Bradley has now defected to Reform. They really are taking all the worst people from the Boris era.”
While Anderson praised Bradley’s skills and thanked him for supporting him early in his political career, critics pointed to a string of offensive remarks the former Tory MP for Mansfield has made over the years.
In 2020, Bradley refused to take part in unconscious bias training for MPs, which he said was “nonsensical”.
In October 2020, he suggested that the money spent on free school meal vouchers went to brothels and crack dens. He said his tweet, which he later deleted, had been “totally taken out of context”.
In 2018, a blog post he wrote in 2012 resurfaced, in which he suggested that unemployed people should have vasectomies to stop them having large families.
In 2011, he also said that he was excited to see the police play “splat the chav” with water cannons during the London riots.
When he was a Tory councillor in 2016, Bradley admitted to making up an allegation that Ashfield District Council had used an Indian call centre to carry out a £17,000 phone survey with residents.
Bradley has also drawn criticism for how many times he changed his mind on Brexit.
In an interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy in March 2019, the journalist highlighted Bradley’s contradictory record on Brexit: he voted remain in 2016, then became a Brexiteer, voted against the Brexit deal, then for it, then said he would struggle to back it, and finally confirmed he would support it.
Guru-Murthy asked: “Ben Bradley, why do you get to change your mind?”
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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