Lord Dixon-Smith is a former Shadow Minister at the Department for Communities and Local Government.

[1] The son of Dixon and Alice Winifred Smith, Dixon-Smith was educated at Oundle School, at the St. Johnsbury Academy in Vermont, and Writtle Agricultural College in Essex.

[2] On 11 October 1993, he was created a life peer as Baron Dixon-Smith, of Bocking in the County of Essex.

[3] In December 1998, he was appointed the Conservatives' local government spokesman in the House of Lords by party leader William Hague.

[4] In July 2008, he was forced to apologise to the chamber after using the racist idiom, "nigger in the woodpile", during a House of Lords debate.