Terry Dicks
Right-wing Conservative MP who was notorious for speaking his mind on contentious issues
TERRY DICKS, who has died aged 83, was Conservative MP for Hayes and Harlington from 1983 to 1997, and one of the most outspoken members of the Commons. He was ready to express publicly views which his Right-wing colleagues only dared mutter privately to their most trusted friends – and did so unrepentantly in language that was forceful, invariably quotable and frequently offensive.
Criminals, football hooligans and immigrants all felt the lash of his tongue. But the cadaverous Dicks reserved his fiercest attacks for the arts establishment, and government subsidies for such elitist activities as opera. When he spoke on the subject he was one of the few backbenchers able to lure MPS into the chamber from their offices and the bars.
He acquired the nickname “Phil” by elevating Philistinism to an art form. One colleague said Dicks “was to the arts what ‘Bonecrusher’ Smith is to lepidoptery”. He relished giving the over-sensitive cultural elite the vapours, but he had a serious purpose. He articulated a genuine concern that money was spent on supporting cultural activities for the rich while more popular entertainers, and sport, received virtually nothing.
Dicks was never a man to adapt his views to prevailing fashion, or to mince his words on even the most sensitive of subjects. He was loved by the press, for whom he kept ready an Aladdin’s cave of quotes, and became increasingly popular with his constituents, who elected him three times in a working-class and traditionally Labour seat.
When John Mcdonnell delivered his maiden speech, having recaptured Hayes & Harlington for Labour on Dicks’s retirement, he denounced him as “a stain”, “a malignant creature” and an espouser of racism.
Many fellow Conservative MPS regarded Dicks with dismay. Even his fellow Right-winger Teddy Taylor said he was inclined to “boneheaded abuse”. According to Labour’s Tony Banks, his speeches were “made additionally entertaining … by the looks of horror on the faces of so many of his colleagues.”
The robustness and lack of taste with which Dicks voiced his opinions was equalled by his frankness about his own disability: in the House he always referred to himself as a “spastic”.
Dicks was born with cerebral palsy, which left him unable to put his right foot down until he was nine and gave him a slight limp for the rest of his life. This profoundly affected his attitude to abortion, leading him to support measures to limit the period during which a pregnancy could be terminated.
He explained: “If the technology that is available now had been available 50 years ago, a doctor may well have said to my mother: ‘You are 40 years old and are carrying a disabled child; please have it aborted.’”
Terence Patrick Dicks was born in Bristol on March 17 1937; he saw little of his father, and his mother died of arthritis after working as a cleaner. Leaving school at 15, he worked as a clerk at Imperial Tobacco until 1959, then at the Ministry of Labour.
In 1966 he took a Diploma in Economics at Oxford University, following it up with a BSC (Econ) at the LSE. He was an administrative officer at the Greater London Council from 1971 until his election to Parliament, becoming personal assistant to a series of Tory leaders.
A Hillingdon borough councillor from 1974, he first attracted headlines in 1978 when, as housing committee chairman, he offered hostel accommodation to a white Rhodesian family while sending an Asian family in a taxi to the Foreign Office, even though both had just arrived in Britain. The problems ended on Dicks’s plate because Hillingdon includes Heathrow, leaving the council responsible for accommodating deserving immigrants.
Reg Freeson, the Labour housing minister, registered his “utmost contempt and deepest repugnance”. Dicks, though, was unrepentant, insisting that the Asians’ case for staying was “unconvincing while the Rhodesians’ case was not.”
“If their homelessness is genuine,” he added, “they will have all the protection the council can give, whatever their colour happens to be.”
Dicks’s frankness also got him into trouble at the Greater London Council. In 1982 he was suspended after claiming his party were trying to cover up a possible scandal over the Strongbridge Housing Association’s £786,000 arrears; they had, he alleged, used the offer of a better job, and threats, trying to persuade him not to cooperate with Labour in pressing for a full-blown investigation.
Such behaviour led some influential Tories to try to keep Dicks off the candidates’ list. But the party was becoming more egalitarian and Right-wing under Margaret Thatcher, and the social barriers against those like Dicks, who was working-class and lived in a council house, were coming down.
Dicks first took on Labour’s chief whip Michael Cocks at Bristol South in 1979. He was next selected for Hayes and Harlington, taking the seat in 1983 as the Labour vote split between the sitting MP Neville Sandelson, who had defected to the SDP, and a hard-left official candidate.
He struck a chord with his equally working class constituents, building a reputation as the “authentic voice of Heathrow airport”. He increased his majority in 1987, and held on in 1992 when the national trend was against the Conservatives.
At Westminster Dicks began his crusade to give popular culture and sport equality of treatment with the highbrow arts. He had ill-disguised contempt for many in the subsidised art sector. He described Sir Peter Hall, director of the National Theatre, as “the highest-paid part-time civil servant I have ever had the misfortune to come across.”
Dicks’s views on the claims of opera and ballet to be part of Britain’s cultural heritage were even more robust. “I refuse to accept a 20-stone Italian pretending to be half his age and weight, or a bloke prancing round in a French box and tights, as part of my heritage.”
He saw no justification in subsidising (by more than
£600 million in the early 1990s) cultural events invariably attended by those could afford to pay the full rate, when popular culture had to stand on its own two feet.
His own tastes included watching Bristol Rovers (“a 40-yard pass in an FA Cup semi-final is art to me”), Alan Ayckbourn plays, Mario Lanza, Shirley Bassey, the Carpenters, Neil Diamond and Neil Sedaka. He declared: “I believe in consumer sovereignty. Theatres, museums and the rest must pay their way or pack up like any other commercial organisation. If they are really good, they will survive.”
His campaign did not succeed in scrapping the Arts Council and the whole arts bureaucracy, or making the BBC rely on advertising revenue. But, with the major parties arguing only about how much more should be handed out, he was the one MP to oppose the fundamental principle of arts subsidy.
Dicks’s opinions and language on other issues were equally trenchant. He viewed the Commission for Racial Equality and the rest of the “race relations industry” as “completely unnecessary. They only create more racial conflict. Clearly anyone who does not like the British way of life can always leave and go elsewhere.” In 1987, he said it was appalling that “in some areas race relations is given priority over law and order.” Those were some of his milder observations.
He supported political and sporting links with South Africa. Attacking the Government’s decision to talk with the African National Congress’s leader, Oliver Tambo, in 1986, he said it was tantamount to talking to the IRA.
He was in favour of hanging murderers and breaking all contacts with states such as Iran and Libya, which backed terrorism. He called for aid to India to be cut off after he was detained there in 1986 while trying to rescue the Kenyan-born wife of the Anglo-indian Conservative Association chairman; she had been arrested on suspicion of Sikh terrorist links.
For football hooligans (including “those pigs from Scotland”) he proposed either the birch or spraying with dye so that “people know they are subhuman”. After one particularly violent outbreak in 1985, he accused the sports minister Neil Macfarlane of “prancing around like a fairy on top of a Christmas tree” instead of taking action.
Another of his passions was to improve standards of dress in the Commons, which had relaxed somewhat in the 1980s. Dicks urged the Speaker not to call MPS who did not reach certain basic standards. Characteristically, he did not shirk from naming the “scruffiest” Labour MPS.
Of Dave Nellist he said: “If he wants to go around dressed like a slob off a barrow, he should go off and be a barrow boy.” Jeremy Corbyn – who reckoned Dicks to be “scurrilous and racist” – “sometimes wears a scruffy polo-neck sweater. It is appalling.” When Harriet Harman appeared in sweater and jeans, Dicks said “any resemblance between her and a lady was entirely coincidental.”
Dicks’s bark was invariably worse than his bite. Except on such direct constituency issues as flights into Heathrow and the Rate Support Grant, he was invariably loyal in the division lobbies.
This was never more clearly demonstrated than in 1993, when the government faced defeat on a crucial clause of the Bill to ratify the Maastricht treaty. Dicks was by instinct anti-european, but believed Tory Eurosceptics were undermining John Major. Although extremely ill in hospital, Dicks defied doctors’ advice and insisted on voting.
When the government was none the less defeated, Dicks said: “I have nothing against Labour. I have everything against those bastards, the Tory rebels. I have walked through broken glass to support John Major. If I had been in my hospital bed and we had lost by one vote, I would never have forgiven myself.”
He retired from the Commons in 1997. From 1999 to 2009 he served on Surrey county council, and from 2011 on Runnymede district council.
Terry Dicks was twice married, secondly to Janet Cross, with whom he had a daughter. He also had two daughters and a son in his first marriage.
Terry Dicks, born March 17 1937, died June 17 2020