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Hello and welcome to Spectator Out Loud. Each week we choose three pieces from the magazine and ask their writers to read them aloud.

I'm Oscar Edmondson

and on the podcast this week. James Heel read his interview with new Deputy Tory Party Chair

Lee Anderson. Hannah Moore writes in defence of amateur sleuths. And Matthew Wilson read his art

lead on the rehabilitation of the Rose. Up first, James Heel.

Who is the worst man in Britain?

According to the Daily Mirror, it's 56-year-old former coal miner and Tory MP Lee Anderson,

who clinched the award a year ago after criticising England's footballers for taking the knee.

Howard Anderson, who this week was appointed Tory Deputy Chairman, respond to the accolade.

I immediately rang my parents to thank them for all their support.

It's the first time anyone from my family has been voted the worst man in Britain,

so I tried to win it two years on the trot.

Since his election in December 2019,

Anderson has emerged as the pugnacious ambassador for the red wall intake of Conservative MPs.

He is, like his Asheville constituency,

a Tory convert, having served as a Labour councillor until a year before his election.

While many well-heeled Tories shy away from the cost of living issues, Anderson relishes the debate,

arguing that anyone earning over £30,000 using food banks, must have a budgeting problem.

He won the nickname 30P Lee, after he claimed that £50 could be used to produce 172 meals and feed a family of five for a week. We meet a few

days before his appointment when Anderson is still a backbencher. In a parliament increasingly

dominated by middle-class professionals, Anderson says he can speak plainly about food banks and other

...