NORMAN TEBBIT was a genuine Tory working-class hero.
A giant among the towering figures of Margaret Thatcher’s decade as PM and a man seen by many, including himself, as her natural successor.
GettyNorman Tebbit, who died on Monday age 94, was among the last true Thatcherites who drove Britain’s 1970s leap from ‘Sick Man of Europe’ to global superpower[/caption]
Mr Tebbit, alongside Margaret Thatcher at the scene of the IRA attack two years laterGetty
Alpha Photo Press AgencyThe Tory hardman on a stretcher after being extracted from the rubble of the Brighton bombing in 1984[/caption]
His hopes were destroyed by the IRA Brighton bomb which nearly killed the Iron Lady herself in 1984 and left Tebbit’s wife, Margaret, paralysed for life.
He touched the hearts and spoke the language of millions of Tory voters as the party struggled to find the right leader.
Norman Tebbit, who died on Monday, aged 94, was among the last true Thatcherites who drove Britain’s 1970s leap from “Sick Man of Europe” to global superpower.
His legacy remains a vivid reminder of a bygone and perhaps unrepeatable age when huge economic and global challenges were met by decisive and courageous leadership.
It is a legacy which stands in stark contrast to the hand-wringing, shroud-waving deceit of modern politics.
‘Whipped the pickets’
Norman Tebbit was the so-called “Chingford Skinhead” who broke the unions’ destructive stranglehold over strike-plagued, state-run industries and opened the door to privatisation.
As Margaret Thatcher’s Employment Secretary in 1981, he crushed union bullies and defeated pussy-footing Cabinet “wets” desperate for peace at any price.
Over the following decades, Britain blossomed. Strikes dried up, taxes fell, debt subsided and UK plc was set loose to trade and prosper.
Tebbit was in the thick of it, vilified by Labour leader Michael Foot as a “semi-house-trained polecat” and satirised by Spitting Image as a leather-clad, brass-knuckled thug.
He accepted the abuse as a badge of honour, with a polecat prominent on his House of Lords crest.
It was Norman Tebbit who led the Tory eurosceptics in the battle to prevent Britain joining the botched European single currency — the euro.
He was vehemently opposed to PM John Major’s decision to sign the Maastricht Treaty binding Britain into the clutches of unelected Brussels bureaucrats.
It is likely that Nigel Farage’s Reform Party would not exist today without Norman Tebbit’s crusade against EU moves to drain the UK of its sovereignty as a nation state.
Today the Thatcher era, which made Britain the envy of the world, is a distant memory.
Asked how he would react if he bumped into IRA mouthpieces Gerry Adams or Martin McGuinness, he said: ‘As long as I was driving a heavy truck when I bumped into him I would laugh’
“Too many people in politics are rather poor material,” said Lord Tebbit shortly before he died.
His words were vindicated last week by the anniversary of Sir Keir Starmer’s catastrophic first year as Labour Prime Minister.
Norman Beresford Tebbit was born into a working-class family in Ponders End, Middlesex.
His father, Len, fought on the Western Front in World War One. His mother, Edith, a butcher’s daughter, was “a very tough lady”.
Tebbit recently recalled: “In 1926, at the heart of the general strike, she was delivering meat to customers in a pony and trap when a picket line tried to stop her.
“She simply whipped the pony first and, as they rode through the line, whipped the pickets too.”
Tebbit left grammar school at 16 to join the Financial Times.
He was incensed when ordered to join NATSOPA, the closed shop print union.
He joined the RAF as a pilot, injuring his spine after crashing a Meteor jet.
He said: “After escaping death, I always felt I was playing with the casino’s money.”
Later, as MP for Chingford, he deployed the instincts of a fighter pilot to pick off Mrs T’s political enemies.
The two allies fell out briefly when he suggested her image as “That Bloody Woman” might discourage voters — but his blunt style offered her protection, diverting flak away from the PM.
I first met Norman Tebbit while covering his 1983 election role as a caustic campaigner who sought and gave no quarter.
Tebbit was a former pilot, who served in the RAF in the fifties – pictured here in 1970
Norman and Margaret on their wedding day in 1956
PAThe pair returned to the Grand Hotel in 2009, with Margaret in a wheelchair[/caption]
In Brighton the following year, I watched him being stretchered in agony from the rubble of the Grand Hotel, a survivor of an IRA murder attempt on Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet.
Tebbit’s beloved wife, Margaret, a nurse, emerged paralysed for life after being crushed under a collapsed wall.
Asked how he would react if he bumped into IRA mouthpieces Gerry Adams or Martin McGuinness, he said: “As long as I was driving a heavy truck when I bumped into him I would laugh.”
As he took a back seat from politics to care for his beloved wife, Tebbit took up pheasant shooting and became a crack shot.
“Every time I pull the trigger I am saying to myself either ‘Adams’ or ‘McGuinness’. It helps,” he said.
Lady Tebbit died in 2020, aged 86, and the couple had three children. Norman Tebbit was savaged as heartless after telling the jobless to get “on yer bike”.
But his words had been twisted. He had been responding to a suggestion that the 1981 Brixton riots were a natural reaction to unemployment.
‘I didn’t want him to go’
Tebbit said: “I grew up in the Thirties 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.”
He loathed the loony left who, as today, wielded huge power in local authorities and nationalised industry.
He was accused of being a “fascist” after bringing in laws curbing trade union power.
This was at a time when the miners leader Arthur “King Coal” Scargill, an avowed Marxist, had declared war on Margaret Thatcher’s democratically elected government.
Jack Jones, leader of the mighty Transport and General Workers Union, was a paid Kremlin spy.
And Hugh Scanlon, of the strike-happy Engineering Union, was a card-carrying Communist.
These, said Tebbit, were the “real enemy of the people”.
In 1979 when Thatcher won power, Britain was losing 30million working days in strike action a year.
Thanks to Tebbit’s laws, the number was slashed to one million by the time she left office.
One of his last political jobs, as Tory Party chairman, was masterminding her 1987 landslide victory.
The next day, as Mrs T celebrated her third election victory, I broke the story of Norman Tebbit’s sensational decision to quit the battlefield and care for his paralysed wife.
He was walking away from his best chance of one day becoming PM.
Mrs Thatcher was dismayed.
“I didn’t want him to go,” she told friends. Later, as Lord Tebbit, he was disgusted by the Tory drift from Thatcherism, first under John Major and then David Cameron.
Major, he said, “combines the mulishness of a weak man with stupidity”.
And he summed up the 2010 Lib-Con coalition as “David Cameron and the bloody tieless and gormless lot”.
Lord Tebbit was a lifelong hero to grassroots Tories, echoing their fury over the bullying EU, the threat to society from ‘woke madness’ and uncontrolled mass immigration
He was aghast when Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne hailed Labour’s Tony Blair as “The Master”.
As an IRA target, he despised Blair for releasing hundreds of convicted IRA terrorists while putting British squaddies in the dock.
He said: “Kneecappers, kidnappers, arsonists and killers have been set free. But their victims remain imprisoned within broken bodies.
“Some imprisoned in grief for their loved ones.”
Lord Tebbit was a lifelong hero to grassroots Tories, echoing their fury over the bullying EU, the threat to society from “woke madness” and uncontrolled mass immigration.
The former Sun columnist famously devised a “cricket test” for migrants aiming to settle in this country.
“A large proportion of Britain’s Asian population fail to pass the cricket test,” he said. “Which side do they cheer for? It’s an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from or where you are?”
He rebuked Cameron for turning his back on Thatcherism and rejecting the eternal political values which won voters of all parties.
These included “low tax, controlled immigration, schools that teach basic skills rather than political correctness, and the belief that we can govern ourselves and make our own laws”.
He added: “These are the issues which would bring disenchanted one-time Tory voters and disenchanted Labour voters alike to support a government,” he said. That was in 2012.
But these were core Conservative policies which today’s floundering Tory party could use in their next election manifesto.
The Tory hardman was satirised by Spitting Image as a leather-clad, brass-knuckled thug
AlamyTebbit was vilified by Labour leader Michael Foot as a ‘semi-house-trained polecat’ – which he saw as a badge of honour[/caption] Published: [#item_custom_pubDate]
