By David Osland

You’ll probably think I’m making this up. But yes, there really was once a Tory MP called Terry Dicks.

His 14-year parliamentary career came to an end in 1997, when the voters of Hayes and Harlington elected the Labour candidate instead. Some bloke called John McDonnell, if I remember correctly.

But for the duration of his House of Commons tenure in the Thatcher and Major era, Dicks was the go-to rent-a-gob of the hard right of the Conservative Party, or at least one of them.

Think in terms of the persona that a fledgling novelist yet to develop the gift of subtle characterisation would devise as a cartoon parody satirising Conservative backbenchers of a certain stripe. But this guy was for real.

On issue after issue, his muscular views generated instant headlines for copy-hungry Daily Mail and Daily Express hacks out to titillate the prejudices of their readerships.

Dicks’ famously nuanced contentions included the bright idea that government public health campaigning on HIV/AIDS should centre on the slogan “If you shove your willy up someone’s bum you’re going to catch more than a cold.”

Immigrants he described as “the flotsam and jetsam from all over the world”, and he mocked a family of Somali refugees for buying bottled water in a supermarket, on the grounds that “where they come from, they’re happy to drink out of puddles.”

Naturally, he was a major death penalty fanboy. When the Malaysian government executed an easily-suggestible British man with brain damage who had been conned into acting as a drug mule, Dicks’ wrote to congratulate them.

I could go on, but you get the picture. Dicks – who died in 2020 – was an archetype of the Poundshop Powells, a certain layer of Tory backbenchers who happily court popularity with the base by trotting out half-baked banalities of the ‘bring back the rope’/‘deport bloody immigrants’ variety.

The ones lacking the ability to spit out Latin hashtags ad voluntatum put themselves forward as plain spoken say-it-like-I-see-it types, the Westminster voice of the man in the pub. They revel in the mockery of effete over-educated lefties what ain’t never done a day’s work in their life.

But since the rise of David Cameron, they have generally been relegated to figures of fun, even within their own party. Most recent Tory prime ministers have been anxious to distance themselves from recycled neanderthal clap-trap.

They present instead as decent chaps. They are naturally laid-back about gay marriage and perhaps discretely au fait with a line or two of recreational cocaine. Heaven forfend they might harbour any opinion beyond the pale at a vaguely progressive middle-class dinner party.

But like the good advocates of outsourcing of public services they always are, they’re happy to keep their hands clean when it comes to subcontracting the dirty work.

Step forward Lee Anderson. The Tory MP for Ashfield, not too long ago a Labour councillor and paid staffer to a Labour MP, is now firmly established as Britain’s number one Terry Dicks tribute act.

Anderson’s argument that the exponential rise of food banks is down to virtue-signalling by ‘do-gooders’, and that it is entirely possible for people to eat well for just 30p a day, has earned him the social media nickname “30p Lee”. And doesn’t he just love it.

Asylum seekers should be “sent back the same day”, and the death penalty should be reintroduced on account of its “100% success rate”.

And of course, it is true that nobody ever went on to commit a crime after being executed; the problem is, no small number never committed a crime before being executed, either.

For most of the century to date, it would have been possible to write Anderson off as part of a small cohort of Tory head-bangers, darlings of their constituency associations perhaps, but never likely to trouble prominent office.

The snag with that reasoning is that he is now deputy chairman of Britain’s governing party. Forget Rishi Sunak’s carefully cultivated patina of social liberalism: he knew what he was doing when he gave Anderson the job, and Anderson knew what was expected of him when he agreed to take it.

Doubling down on the culture war will reputedly form a central plank of the next Conservative general election effort. Within that effort, the division of labour is clear.

The higher ups will limit themselves to railing at the iniquities of tofu-eating Guardian-reading wokerati and telling the world they know what a woman is.

Meanwhile, Anderson will be front and centre of the campaign. Or should I say front, centre and hard right?

That inflammatory Tory rhetoric could see more fascist flash mobs setting police vans ablaze outside asylum seeker accommodation and more murdered trans teenagers does not seem an overriding concern at Conservative Campaign Headquarters.

Terry Dicks is no longer with us to applaud the endeavours of his successor. But I’m sure he would have been a happy man.

David Osland is a member of Hackney North & Stoke Newington CLP and a long-time left wing journalist and author. Follow him on Twitter at @David__Osland

Image: Lee Anderson MP. Source: https://members-api.parliament.uk/api/Members/4743/Portrait?cropType=FullSize. Author: David Woolfall, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.