𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Few modern politicians have ever matched Norman Tebbit’s gift for capturing the imagination of the British public. The sharp contours of his vivid personality, combined with his gaunt appearance, his air of menace and his powerful rhetoric, made him a commanding figure in the Conservative Cabinet of the 1980s.

Margaret Thatcher relied on him. Other Ministers feared him. He revelled in his reputation as the Prime Minister’s maverick enforcer, epitomised by his portrayal on the satirical TV show Spitting Image as a thuggish bovver boy, complete with bike chain, leather jacket and cockney accent. The hard man reputation was further reinforced by nicknames like the Chingford Strangler or the Chingford Skinhead – both of which stemmed from his east London constituency – while Labour elder statesman Michael Foot once called him a “semi-house trained polecat,” which pleased Tebbit so much that, when he received his peerage in 1992, he incorporated a polecat into his heraldic shield.

Tebbit’s influence was all the greater because of his ability to craft a striking phrase that caught a strong current of public opinion, as happened at the Tory Party Conference in 1981, which took place after a summer of violent urban unrest. To resounding cheers from the faithful, Tebbit related his own family’s experience in the 1930s, a time of severe economic depression. “My father did not riot. He got on his bike and looked for work,” he said. The phrase “on yer bike” entered the political lexicon as code for tough-minded Thatcherite employment policy.

It was Tebbit who also came up with the concept of “the Cricket Test” as a barometer of integration. In an explosive move that has caused controversy to this day, he asked in April 1990 which side migrants cheered: their adopted country of England or their homeland. “A large proportion of Britain’s Asian population fails to pass the cricket Test,” he suggested, because they still “hark back to where they came from”.

Tebbit later said that the rise of militant Islam – seen at its dangerous worst on the July 2005 bombings, two decades ago this week – was a vindication of his views.

But the most memorable image of Norman Tebbit in the 1980s was not one of him triumphing on the platform or in Parliament. On the contrary, it was the footage of his broken, pyjama-clad body being pulled from the rubble of the collapsed Grand Hotel in Brighton, agony etched on his face, whitened by dust and shock.

As the main hosts for the 1984 Tory Conference, the Grand had been ruthlessly targeted in an IRA bomb plot. Tebbit and his wife Margaret were two of the most high-profile victims of the blast, falling no fewer than four stories as the building crumbled when the device detonated. As they waited for hours for help to arrive, both of them contemplated death, though even at this anguished hour, Tebbit did not lose his sense of humour. When the rescue party finally reached him and prepared their emergency medicines, they asked if he was allergic to anything. “Only bombs,” he quipped.

Badly injured, Tebbit spent three months in hospital undergoing rehabilitation and surgery. His wife suffered more, spending 21 months in hospital. Even when she was returned home, she was confined to a wheelchair and in later life, required 24-hour care. Her severe disability had a profound impact on Tebbit’s career and wider British politics.

In the mid-eighties, he was often viewed as Mrs Thatcher’s likely successor, with Michael Heseltine as his only serious rival. But those dreams were ended by his long-term concerns for his wife’s health. After the general election of 1987, another Thatcherite landslide, he withdrew from frontline politics so he could devote more time to her.

He never held office again. Understandably, he was bitter in his hatred for the IRA and never forgave the leaders of Irish republicanism. When he went out pheasant shooting, he used to mutter “Adams” or “McGuinness” just as he pulled this trigger to fire at any bird in his sights.

He certainly had the talent to make it to the summit, having successfully presided over the Government’s huge privatisation programme, and also tamed the militant trade unions through measures like the abolition of the notorious closed shop and tighter restrictions on strike ballots.

On the other hand, his capacity to promote friction and discourse did not make him an easy colleague. During the 1987 general election, Tory organiser Lord Young became so infuriated by him that he grabbed his lapel, pushed him up against the wall and shouted at him: “Norman, listen to me, we’re about to lose this f***ing election.”

Alan Clark, the Tory minister, whose diaries remain perhaps the best – and certainly the most entertaining – commentary on the Thatcher era, claimed Tebbit was “as thick as a plank”. Margaret Thatcher herself thought he had too many enemies to make him a plausible candidate. “I could not get him elected party leader even if I wanted – nor would the country elect him if he was,” she once said,

Yet the remarkable aspect of Tebbit’s character was that, away from the political arena, he could be charming, sympathetic, and humorously self-deprecating. In his diary, Tony Benn described him in private as “essentially soft and good-natured”. Just as Tebbit belied his image as a bruiser with the chivalrous compassion towards his stricken wife, so he was never stuck in the grooves of conventional right wing orthodoxy.

I once sat beside him at a dinner where he explained his belief that dogs and their owners could have a deep telepathic relationship, claiming that his own golden labrador Ben could read his mind. As an example, he said that if he was going out shooting on a certain morning Ben – without a word being spoken – would go to the gun room the night before and lie beneath Tebbit’s favourite weapon as if meditating on the expedition the next day.

Indeed, he was so taken with the concept of canine telepathy that he told me of his plan to write a children’s book about a talking dog. He actually did so and, in 2014, the book was published to favourable reviews, telling the story of murder-mystery solved a disabled boy whose labrador has the magical power of speech. Tebbit was also the author of another unlikely book: a guide on how to cook game. Yet neither game recipes nor shooting featured in Tebbit’s austere working-class upbringing.

Born in 1931 in Ponder’s End, Middlesex, he was the son of a pawnbroker and manager of a jewellery business. But times were hard and the family often struggled when his father had to look for work after his job disappeared.

With money tight, Tebbit left school at 16, becoming an apprentice on the Financial Times. It was in this first position that he developed his lifelong antipathy toward the trade unions, having been forced to join the closed shop run by the print union NATSOPA.

He was relieved to get out of this post at the age of 18 when he was called up for National Service. Having joined the RAF, he became a qualified pilot and won a commission as an officer, though he had one terrifying brush with death when flying a Meteor jet. It seems that, while trying to take-off, he lost consciousness, with the result that the plane ploughed off the runway and burst into flames. Fortunately Tebbit, with a tremendous physical effort, managed to prise his canopy open and clamber out to safety. Years later, doctors found during medical tests that he had suffered all his life from cardiac arrhythmia which may have caused his blackout.

Tebbit meanwhile developed a deep interest in politics, and believing that this was incompatible with military service, left the RAF to go into advertising. But he could not escape his passion for flying so, in 1953, he joined national flag carrier the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) as a pilot. Ironically he also became a union activist with the British Airline Pilots Association, causing some disgruntlement amongst management with his enthusiasm for industrial action.

But at heart, Tebbit remained an instinctive conservative and a believer in free enterprise. He was first elected to the Commons in 1970 but soon became disillusioned with the centrist drift of Ted Heath’s government, hence his early support of Margaret Thatcher. After he left her government, he moved to the House of Lords in 1992 but remained a compelling figure on the political stage, never more so than during the debates on the Maastricht Treaty negotiated by John Major.

Gyles Brandreth, then a Tory MP, wrote in his diary of Tebbit’s ”vulgar, grandstanding, barnstorming performance” at the party conference in 1992. “He stood there, arms aloft, acknowledging the ovation, Norman the Conqueror.”

Later, Tebbit later also mocked John Major over his affair with Edwina Curry as “a wonderful illustration of mutual bad taste”.

Tebbit lived to see his euro scepticism triumph with the Brexit referendum. He had played his part in preparing the ground for the return of our national independence, but he would despair at what the Labour government is now doing to Britain.

He helped to defeat socialism in the 1980s. Now the job has to be done all over again.