Norman Tebbit, the populist Tory once described as “radiating menace”, who has died at the age of 94, was Margaret Thatcher’s key lieutenant for most of her premiership. After he left office, exasperated, in 1987, she found herself without important allies and on the path towards her own downfall three years later.
One of the most influential politicians of his day and a brilliant tactician who was expected at one point to become Thatcher’s successor, Tebbit’s uncompromising views and mordant wit brought him admiration from the Tory grass roots and loathing from many of his opponents, including some in his own party. As Thatcher’s most trusted colleague, he did what she wanted done. As employment secretary, he cut back trade union powers and then supervised financial deregulation at the Department of Trade and Industry.
He was a man of great fortitude, as he showed after he and his wife, Margaret, became the most prominent victims of the IRA Brighton bombing at the 1984 Conservative party conference. They fell four storeys; Margaret was paralysed from the neck down and he suffered painful injuries. Fellow Tory David Hunt was with him in the hours that followed the Tebbits’ rescue from the rubble in the full glare of the television lights. Years later, asked what was Tebbit’s most outstanding quality, Hunt replied simply: “Courage.”
His socially conservative attitudes always left him uneasy with the more metropolitan, liberalising wing of his party and this, along with his views on race and Europe, offered a striking premonition of the current direction of the UK right, even if he was always more thoughtful and heavyweight than his latter-day disciples.
Tebbit had imprinted his identity on politics with his “on yer bike” comments in response to widespread rioting in 1981, which was partly blamed on unemployment. In fact, he did not use the phrase that stuck with him; his actual words were: “I grew up in the ’30s with an unemployed father. He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking till he found it.”
Among the Tory grass roots, red in tooth and claw, he commanded rapture. Cool about Europe, hostile to immigration and a “cheerful hanger” — he was in favour of the death penalty — he had a defiant contempt for political correctness. When he first sought a Commons seat he summed up the contrast between himself and the previous candidate by telling Tory selectors: “I am not a lawyer, I am not a homosexual and . . . ”, hitting the table, “ . . . I am not a gentleman.”
Yet he was a more complex man than he first appeared — sharper, funnier, and more thoughtful. In the TV show Spitting Image, he was depicted as a leather-jacketed yob, so those meeting him for the first time were often surprised by his gentle voice and studious civility, though the menace was often not far below the surface.
Though a conviction politician, he was also a subtle operator. As Thatcher’s employment secretary, he took on the overweening trade unions and cut back their powers. After the Brighton bombing, he became party chair. His vicious attacks on Labour’s “loony left” delighted supporters and earned him such epithets as “the Chingford Strangler” and — from former Labour leader Michael Foot — “a semi-house-trained polecat”.
Yet it was his own leader who ultimately undermined him. He fell victim to one of Thatcher’s periodic bouts of panic and disloyalty in the lead up to the 1987 general election following what became known as “Wobbly Thursday”. In the middle of the campaign, he had said that a Tory majority below 50 would amaze him. In the event, it was nearer 100.
Yet rival PR and advertising men, as well as fellow Tory Lord Young, began to panic about the election, winding up Thatcher after a single rogue opinion poll. Tebbit — who urged her to hold her nerve — was undermined, despite the election subsequently delivering a thumping majority.
It badly soured relations. In constant pain since Brighton, he concluded it was no longer worth staying and left the government to care for his wife. Through her own folly, Thatcher had lost the one senior man unreservedly on her side.
Born in north London in 1931 on the eve of the Great Depression, the job at the end of his father Len’s bike ride was that of a pawnbroker’s assistant. Tebbit’s childhood in dingy surroundings, with his real ability recognised late, produced a difficult but fascinating man who was always spiky.
After leaving Edmonton County Grammar School at 16, he joined the Financial Times — the newspaper’s contribution to his politics being the contempt he built up for the practices of the print unions he witnessed — and then did his national service in the RAF, where he qualified as a pilot.
Flying, first in the RAF and then for a commercial airline, gave him self-assurance, although he learned it the hard way. During one take-off in a Meteor, he found himself trapped in the cockpit with the plane on fire and his oxygen mask full of blood. He thought it was the end but he did not panic and eventually scrambled free. He later said the incident had made him stronger, ended any fears of dying and made him determined to use well the extra time he had been given.
He became a trade unionist, pushing one strike for pilots’ union Balpa, resisting another. In 1956, he married Margaret Daines, and the couple had two sons and a daughter.
Forty years before, with similar opinions, Tebbit would have become a Labour MP, the sharpest sort of union heavy. As it was, he was elected as a Tory MP in 1970, first for Epping and later, after boundary changes, Chingford.
Despite his reputation for electric one-liners — he invited one leftwinger with a cardiac condition to “go away and have another heart attack” — he acknowledged privately in 1979 that “I’ve said things I’m not proud of”. Softening his act, he rose through the ministerial ranks to the cabinet.
But after Brighton in 1984, bitterness, long restrained, came seeping out. Friends detected an angrier man. Being let down by Thatcher did not help. After the 1987 election, he gave up the front bench to combine his parliamentary role with directorships that yielded the money needed to treat his wife’s condition. Thatcher kept his loyalty, though he later commented, lethally, that she commanded “more respect than affection”.
But while Tebbit never returned to the front line, his political contribution was far from over. His attitudes towards liberal society, race and nationality and the EU, which seemed behind the times when he uttered them, are now reflective of many of the positions of the modern right.
Elevated to the House of Lords in 1992, he soon signalled an unwillingness to melt away, with a barnstorming show of disloyalty to the new Tory prime minister John Major, demanding he ditch the Maastricht treaty, seen as the PM’s greatest negotiating triumph. That battle marked the Conservatives’ descent into self-destructive feuding over the EU.
Tebbit would become an early supporter of withdrawal from the EU, helping and chairing campaign groups for Brexit, pushing for the referendum and delighting in its outcome.
Other beliefs also kicked against the liberal wing of his party. In a forerunner of many of the attacks on “wokeism”, he argued against what he called “the permissive society”.
On race and nationalism, he coined the so-called “cricket test”, questioning the integration and commitment to Britain of immigrants who cheered for other nations, notably India, Pakistan and the West Indies, when they were playing England. Similar themes have now been taken up by politicians in both the Conservative party and Reform UK.
There were people who hated Tebbit — but he was always bigger and better than his caricature. He was a born parliamentarian, putting his case without jargon. Labour chancellor Denis Healey caught the mood when, late one evening, he encountered Tebbit, a lean, saturnine man, RAF mac flowing behind. Dropping on one knee, Healey made the sign of the cross and demanded garlic. It caught the splendid comic theatre that was always interwoven with Tebbit’s harshness.
