Even Big Brother has kicked people out for using the N-word – what the hell is Theresa May waiting for?

Having learned nothing from the harm Jeremy Corbyn’s protracted ambivalence about disciplining Ken Livingstone did him, May failed to do what ought to have been automatic and instinctive

Just when Theresa May thought things couldn't get any worse, a backbench MP decided it was time to start throwing around antiquated racist remarks (Reuters)

In the matter of Anne Marie Morris, the suspended, though currently unsacked, Tory MP for Newton Abbott, the words struggle to come to mind.

If only, she may be thinking, one particular word had failed to come to what passes for her mind, let alone leave her mouth.

This, as you know, was the one word no white person speaks within half a light year of anyone they do not know, for an absolute certainty, to be a flaming cross-bearing time traveller on a flying visit from mid-1950s Jim Crow America. Not Jeff Sessions, the legendarily racist US Attorney General. Not the most viciously moronic Neanderthal in the EDL. Not the winner of the White Supremacists 100m at this year’s KKK Olympics in Lynchtown, Alabama (the one who in his victory speech reminded the crowd that Jesse Owens had miniature rockets in the back of his plimsolls).

Yet somehow Morris contrived to utter the word in the hearing range of colleagues and strangers. In a bullish keynote address about the blessings of Brexit at the East India Club (you see what comes of letting women beyond the front door of a gentleman’s club; I warned them time and again, but would they listen?), she called the prospect of leaving the EU without a trade deal “the n***** in the woodpile”.

You wouldn’t want to waste too many words on her misuse of that antiquated phrase. But since it means a hidden problem, and not a potential disaster apparent to everyone, the defence asks the judge — in this case, a Mrs Justice Theresa May — to take the offence of ignorance into consideration.

Ignorance of the offence that word must cause, at least in vaguely civilised company, is something else and worse. How cosseted from reality must a well-educated 60-year-old be if she cannot comprehend the sheer unthinkability of using it? What does it say about the residual power of a charmed life in the moneyed shires — public school in Dorset, law degree at Oxford, county councillor in West Sussex, Conservative MP for a Devon constituency — to cocoon the smugly privileged in the time warp bubble of empire?

What makes this so damaging for the Tories isn’t the racism itself. We all know we live among millions of racists, albeit the vast majority have learned more caution about their language than the mega-dummy Morris. We assume a good few dozen of those, at the very least, reside on the Tory benches of the Commons and Lords (The Independent has highlighted eight Conservative politicians who have used the phrase).

We also know that Labour has its own problems, particularly with anti-Semitism (though to his credit Ken Livingstone, who prefers to rely on pseudo-historical fact, would never be recorded saying “yid” or, for a more delectably archaic flavour, “kike”).

The shocker here isn’t Morris’ sublime idiocy, which may or may not extend to her nuancing her ritual apology with the traditional “Well, if it’s OK for rappers to call each other by the word...” Who knows, perhaps she’ll atone by performing a spirited Kendrick Lamar medley at the forthcoming Newton Abbott Conservative Association summer fete?

What should be ruining the Prime Minister’s first anniversary in Downing Street, after an otherwise smooth and trouble-free year, is the timing and symbolism.

Just as the Tories are widely seen to be reverting to what May labelled the “Nasty Party”, just when their perceived remoteness from and aloof indifference toward the lives of the punters threatens to put Labour in power, along comes Lady Muck from Devon deploying the worst word in the whole wide world like an electoral suicide bomb — and seemingly without much of a clue why grave umbrage is taken.

Having learned nothing from the harm Jeremy Corbyn’s protracted ambivalence about disciplining Livingstone did him, May failed to do what ought to have been automatic and instinctive. She should have doled out a life expulsion within 0.0027 seconds of hearing the audio. A slap on the wrist suspension would be a fitting punishment for Bill Cash and John Redwood if, as reported, those two Europhobic beauties heard the word from Morris’ lips without protest.

Every millisecond Morris remains un-expelled goes beyond deepening the impression that the Conservative and Unionist Party is casually, uncomprehendingly and institutionally, racist. It is conceivable that if expelled from the party, Anne Marie Morris may resign from the Commons, thereby triggering a by-election in her constituency. It cements the suspicion that the Prime Minister is such a lethally enfeebled scaredy cat that she doesn’t dare risk a by-election in a seat the Tories took last month with a majority more than 17,000.

When Ron Atkinson used the word during a football commentary, unaware that his mic was live, ITV instantly fired him. After Michael Richards (Kramer in Seinfeld) aimed it a member of a stand-up audience, he barely worked again. A 19-year-old student, Emily Parr, what with being white and by no means Straight Outta Compton, was summarily evicted from the Big Brother house for using the version ending “ah” as a colloquial greeting. Senescent ex-Corrie actor Ken Morley was thrown out of Celebrity Big Brother for using “negro”.

If you already regarded the Tories as fatally divorced from the mores of the age, consider this. They now need lessons on the lowest common denominator standards of decency from the worlds of football, stand-up comedy and deliberately outrageous reality TV.