Norman Tebbit dies aged 94

Telegraph

9 hours ago

Lord Tebbit, one of Margaret Thatcher's most loyal supporters during her years of power, has died at the age of 94.
From a working-class background in Essex and a career as an airline pilot, Norman Tebbit reached the heights of the Conservative cabinet in the 1980s, serving as employment secretary and party chairman.
He was the most high-profile victim of the IRA's bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton and lay trapped for hours under the rubble following the atrocity, which left his wife paralysed for the rest of her life.
Lord Tebbit gained prominence for his tough reaction to the riots of the early years of the Thatcher government, telling one party conference that his father did not riot when he did not have a job: 'He got on his bike and looked for work.'
His combative style against trade union power led to Michael Foot branding him a 'semi-house-trained polecat', an epithet he wore with pride.
He was given a seat in the House of Lords after stepping down as an MP in 1992, where he continued his long opposition against European integration. Lord Tebbit, who retired from politics three years ago, died peacefully on July 7 at 11.15pm.
He was born in 1931 in Ponders End, Middlesex, at the height of the Great Depression, where he was educated at a local state grammar school.
His first job was with the Financial Times, where he came into contact with union officials, which gave him a burning desire to break the power of the closed shop.
After national service in the RAF, where he flew Meteor and Vampire jets, he joined the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) as a pilot.
Later he turned to politics, elected first as Conservative MP for Epping in 1970 and four years later for Chingford.
During his time on the back benches, he harangued the Labour Party over its policies towards the unions, at one point accusing employment secretary Michael Foot of fascism.
In 1977, he accused the unions of harbouring a threat from 'Marxist collectivist totalitarians' and labelled those in his party who failed to stand up to them as appeasers.
When the Conservatives won the 1979 election, Lord Tebbit was given a ministerial post and within two years he was in the Cabinet as employment secretary.
He brought in the Employment Act 1982, which made it harder for unions to bring in a closed shop at workplaces.
Following riots in Brixton and elsewhere, Lord Tebbit strongly rejected the idea that rioting was a natural reaction to high unemployment.
He said: '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.'
The Left used his quotes to misrepresent what he had said, making it appear he had directly called for the unemployed to 'get on your bike'.
On the 80s satirical TV series Spitting Image, he was represented as a leather-clad bovver boy, complete with metal chains. He was said to have enjoyed his representation.
Lord Tebbit never dropped his accent, and it was said that Harold Macmillan, the patrician former Tory prime minister, once remarked of him: 'Heard a chap on the radio this morning talking with a cockney accent. They tell me he is one of Her Majesty's ministers'.
After the 1983 election victory, he was moved to the trade and industry department following Cecil Parkinson's resignation over a sex scandal.
His main success in this position was the privatisation of British Telecom.
In October 1984, Lord Tebbit was caught up in one of the defining events of the Thatcher era – the IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton at 2.54am on the morning of the final day of the Tory party conference.
Five people died in the attempt to assassinate the prime minister and her Cabinet by placing a long-delay time bomb on the sixth floor of the seaside hotel.
It was the height of the Troubles, and Lady Thatcher had made it plain that she would never give in to Republican demands to withdraw from Northern Ireland.
The explosion missed killing the premier by minutes: her bathroom was completely wrecked. Lord Tebbit and his wife were in bed on the second floor, and the force of the blast sent their bed tumbling two floors down into the foyer.
For four long hours, firefighters on ladders struggled to rescue them from a tiny gap, during which time he and his wife held each other's hands and talked to each other in the eerie blackness.
Millions watched on breakfast TV as his feet finally appeared amid the rubble. Finally he was carried out in his pyjamas, covered in dust, and taken to hospital.
Although he survived with a broken collar bone and broken ribs, his wife Margaret was left wheelchair-bound for the rest of her life. She died in 2020.
Famously, Lady Thatcher vowed the conference would go on despite the attack: it opened as normal in the morning and she made a memorable speech at which she said: 'Democracy will prevail'.
Chillingly, the IRA put out a statement, saying: 'Today we were unlucky, but remember we have only to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always.'
While Lord Tebbit was a keen supporter of Lady Thatcher, they briefly fell out during his time as Tory party chairman from 1985 to 1987, when he presented her polling which found that her 'combative virtues were being received as vices: her determination was perceived as stubbornness, her single-mindedness as inflexibility, and her strong will as an inability to listen'.
Lord Tebbit and his chief of staff Michael Dobbs, who went on to write House of Cards, told her this was becoming known as the 'TBW factor': 'That Bloody Woman'. They recommended the Prime Minister take a lower profile in the forthcoming general election. She refused.
Making extensive use of advertisers Saatchi and Saatchi, Lord Tebbit ran the Tory election campaign. He argued with Lady Thatcher and her acolyte Lord Young, who took him by the lapels and told him: 'We're about to lose this f---ing election.'
The Conservatives won with a landslide majority, but Lord Tebbit decided to leave the Cabinet so he could care for his wife.
Even on the back benches, he never strayed far from the headlines. In 1990, he proposed what became known as the 'Tebbit test', when he argued that whether ethnic minorities supported the England cricket team rather than the country of their heritage was a mark of their Britishness.
Lady Thatcher offered him a job in the Cabinet after Geoffrey Howe's resignation, but he turned her down for the sake of his wife.
He was one of her most vocal supporters during the leadership contest against Michael Heseltine, and urged her to fight to the very end.
When she decided to step down, he helped her write the era-defining speech she made in a confidence debate the next day. Lord Tebbit briefly thought of standing for the leadership, but in the end he backed John Major.
He stepped down as an MP in 1992, handing over his seat to future Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith. He sat in the Lords as Barron Tebbit of Chingford.
In future years, he turned against Mr Major, supporting campaigns to leave the European Union and even backing John Redwood when he stood against him.
Lord Tebbit went on to write for newspapers including The Telegraph and retired from the House of Lords in March 2022.