‘Thatcherism is alive and well in Romford,’ proclaims the town’s hard-right Tory MP, Andrew Rosindell. It’s as a reminder of the sheer looniness of that dying creed that Rosindell, who was assisted during his election campaign by a union jack-bedecked bulldog called Spike, performs his most useful function.
Rosindell is a true follower of the now sadly silent Baroness – he joined the Tory party at sixteen after hearing her speak and was heard to lament the fact that she had not been Prime Minister for ‘a lot longer’. Indeed, in Rosindell’s world, there’s just so much unfinished business for the Thatcher revolution. Take crime and punishment, for instance. He’s a keen supporter of the reintroduction of capital punishment – favouring a variety of methods – and is keen to see the return of flogging for violent thugs. He’d also like to castrate persistent rapists – not personally, we presume.
Rosindell, we are sure, would be a great addition to Iain Duncan Smith’s frontbench home affairs team. Maybe the asylum and immigration portfolio would suit him. To Rosindell, asylum seekers are ‘frauds who have come here to take us for a ride’. Forced to quit the anti-immigration, far-right Monday Group during Iain Duncan Smith’s short-lived early modernising phase, the honourable member for Romford wailed: ‘The symbolic action that the Conservative party needs to take is to prove that we as a party want everybody to support us and to join us and to be candidates… we are not going to start going down the route of political correctness.’ Supporters of the ‘socialist’ British National Party – Rosindell’s 2001 description of the fascist party – need not, we should imagine, apply.
But it’s as a foreign office minister in a future Tory government that we think Rosindell would really shine. In the 1980s, he was a keen supporter of arming the Contras in Nicaragua. This fetish for foreign rightwingers is also evident in Rosindell’s flirtation with the post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale party (now part of Silvio Berlusconi’s governing coalition). In 1999, Rosindell emailed the leader of Alleanza Nazionale’s youth wing, Azione Giovani, and rather touchingly told him: ‘I am very proud to be associated with Azione Giovani.’
A former director of the European Foundation, Rosindell also believes that, ‘We don’t need a President of Europe, we don’t need a government of Europe, we don’t need a European Parliament in my opinion.’ He is, furthermore, deeply concerned for the interests of those East European countries about to join the EU. ‘What they don’t need,’ he told the Bruges Group website, ‘having broken away from one socialist bloc is to be tied into another.’
Maybe, though, Rosindell should raise his sights. Earthly matters are perhaps too limiting for a man of such talents. Not, as you might expect, a big fan of ‘trendy vicars’, Rosindell urges the clergy to ‘pay more attention to the Gospel rather than the Guardian.’ Perhaps Prime Minister Duncan Smith could consider making Rosindell the next Archbishop of Canterbury.