I want to sort things out and leave our country in a better state than when I arrived...

GAZING up at his old family home, Lee Anderson recalls growing up in the early 1970s when dawn brought a trickle, then a flood, of miners from their red-brick terraces into a shared alley down to New Hucknall Colliery.

- By Zak Garner-Purkis Investigations Editor

He would scramble to his bedroom window to wave, as his father Paul joined a tide of workers marching by coal bins overflowing with free fuel.

"Watching my dad go off to the pit taught me, that's what men do," Anderson tells the Daily Express. "They get up at the crack of dawn to go to work and do an incredibly difficult job to pay rent, put food on the table and clothes on your back. And when you got to 15 to 17, you knew that's what you were going to do too.

Anderson, 58, who has represented three parties, might be one of the UK's most controversial politicians. He is certainly the most straight-talking. He was down the mine at 18 and stayed until a year after its closure.

"It might not seem like an aspiration to go to work in a coal mine, but I knew that's what I had to do to earn money," he says.

Anderson has invited me to walk with him round the Nottinghamshire town of Sutton-in-Ashfield on a frosty January morning nearly five decades later. The only worker we see making his way down the alley is a local drug dealer, sucking on a vape. The remaining coal bins are filled with soiled clothing and broken children's toys.

"It's gone from being a load of coal miners and factory workers to drug dealers and the unemployed," says Anderson ruefully.

Uncompromising