Dicks

It may be a bit much to hope that David Cameron, Michael Gove, and numerous of those on the benches behind them might wear their old Hang Mandela T-shirts to tomorrow's House of Commons tributes.

But Cameron is doing so metaphorically even if not literally, and that twice over. The Conservative Whip in the House of Lords continues to extend to Norman Tebbit. The Conservative Whip on Runnymede Borough Council continues to extend to Terry Dicks (4 Gray Place, Ottershaw, Surrey, KT16 0GB; 01932 872903; cllr.terry.dicks@runnymede.gov.uk).

Where would they go? UKIP would not now take them, although it would have done so very recently, and it is hardly news that that party is replete with such people at every level of its life.

We are now in the countdown to a General Election, and the fun is over, the gloves are off, the likes of the Mail on Sunday are returning to the unambiguous fold, no more pro-UKIP articles are going to be appearing in the Tory papers, but an awful lot of very anti-UKIP ones indeed will be doing so. That has now begun.

It has been put to me that Britain, which invented concentration camps in order to put Boer women and children in them, was not in any position to lecture those victims' close relatives about human rights.

Well, I have stood in the Boer PoW cemetery in Saint Helena, and I have seen the graves of 15-year-old boys, their headstones inscribed in their captors' language rather than their own.

But that is still not much of an argument for the approach of, especially, a Government of the post-1970s Radical Right, which denies to this day that there was anything wrong in the British conduct of the Boer War.

Boer nationalists, who had avenged their grandfathers by declaring a republic and then by leaving the Commonwealth, were not obvious objects of Tory sympathy. One would have thought. 

Yet the likes of the Monday Club genuinely were oddly sympathetic towards the old South Africa, and the position of the English-speaking white minority there was very strange.

They stayed, they prospered, and hardly any of their areas ever returned an MP for any of the successive anti-apartheid or apartheid-sceptical white parties. Helen Suzman was of Lithuanian Jewish parentage, with no ancestral connection to Britain.

But even the Boers' revenge republic never removed the Union Flag from its own. Rhodesia did that, as well as purporting to abolish the monarchy.

Yet the Conservative Right was fanatically devoted to Rhodesia, which we were very lucky never received American recognition. White supremacist farming pioneers who had declared UDI from Britain did rather remind a lot of Americans of someone, especially since Americans have long managed to convince themselves that the Founding Fathers were lower-middle-class, very much the background that really did settle Rhodesia.

The Rhodesians ought not to have reminded ultra-Tories of anyone, or at least not of anyone with whom they felt any identification. Yet somehow, they did. It took Thatcher to install a Maoist instead, even securing a knighthood for him. As with her use of the SAS to train the Khmer Rouge, she was quite true to Red Star's description of her as "a Peking Plotter".

Anyone but those who had turned to the Soviet Union because what we are now supposed to call "The Anglosphere, Inventors of Freedom" had refused them the slightest assistance, instead aiding and abetting the decidedly non-freedom-advancing other side, which was very often white and English-speaking, complete with broadly Westminster-style institutions.

Had Thatcher ties to the Pan-Africanist Congress, with a view to using it against a future ANC government, or indeed to preventing such a government's ever coming to power? I fully expect so. That would have been in keeping with the other contacts that she kept up, including in these Islands.

If Maoist China backed anything against the clients of the Soviet Union, then so did the Peking Plotter. Even Mugabe, Ceaușescu and Pol Pot, never mind the PAC. Those crowing over the discovery of a preserved Maoist cell from the 1970s, still functioning in London, need to bear that in mind.

It must be said that if the ANC was or is being directed by the South African Communist Party, then the latter has not done, and is not doing, much of a job. The Hard and Far Left have been extremely critical of post-apartheid South Africa for as long as there has been such a thing, including of the failings, also pointed out at the time and since by Helen Suzman and Desmond Tutu, during the years of Mandela's Presidency.

People who claim that such criticism has not been made have not being paying attention. They need to read the Morning Star, for example.

Either that, or they are wilfully dishonest.