Norman Tebbit: fearsome politician who served as Thatcher's enforcer

One of the defining politicians of his age, Norman Tebbit, who has died aged 94, was among Margaret Thatcher's most steadfast supporters and acted as her cabinet enforcer.

A self-made man who had grown up in a working-class suburb of north London, he helped draw millions of former Labour voters to the Thatcherite cause by championing the virtues of hard work, self-reliance and enterprise, while railing against everything from European federalism and unionism to the permissive society, said The Times.

At a party conference in 1981, it was suggested that the Brixton riots might have been a reaction to unemployment. Tebbit replied that his father had been out of work in the 1930s. "He didn't riot," he said. "He got on his bike and looked for work." He never told anyone to get "on yer bike", but the phrase was attributed to him and used to suggest that he didn't care about the three million who were unemployed in the early 1980s. He denied this, insisting that his point had been about the rioters, but he was very much on the right flank of his party, and some of his opinions were too strong even for members of his own side: many Tories objected when, for instance, he claimed in 1990 that British Asians who cheered their countries of origin at cricket matches against England had failed to integrate (the so-called Tebbit test).

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Courageous and quick-witted, Tebbit was almost as combative with the Tory "wets" as he was with the Left – and he could be fearsome with both. In the Commons, he once shouted "You'll have another heart attack!" to a Labour MP with heart disease, said The Guardian. He suggested that Prince Charles's reported sympathy for the unemployed might be down to the fact that he had no job. His Spitting Image puppet depicted him as a bovver boy in a leather jacket. The Labour leader Michael Foot referred to him as a "semi-housetrained polecat"; and he was nicknamed the "Chingford Skinhead". Yet when they met him, said The Daily Telegraph, people were often surprised to find him amiable, softly spoken and compassionate.

Even Tebbit's opponents conceded that he was a "minister of substance", and he seemed destined for high office – until 1984, when he was almost killed in the IRA's bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, during the Tory conference. He and his wife Margaret were asleep in bed at the time. As the building caved in, they fell four storeys and were buried under rubble: seriously injured, they lay there, holding hands, for four hours. Tebbit was pictured being carried away on a stretcher in his pyjamas, covered in dust. Asked by medics if he was allergic to anything, he quipped, "Only bombs." He spent three months in hospital and was left in daily pain. Margaret was in hospital for nearly two years. Paralysed from the chest down, she never walked again. Tebbit returned to work, but after the 1987 election he left government so that he could devote more time to "my Margaret".

The political bruiser proved a tender carer, said Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph, putting on his wife's make-up for her, and waking up twice in the night to turn her in bed. He believed it was the least he owed her, but it cost him the chance to stand in the 1990 leadership election to replace Thatcher. His friends believed that he carried a burden of guilt about Margaret's fate: she had never been much interested in politics and would not have been in Brighton were it not for him. Tebbit never forgave those responsible for the bombing, which had killed five people. After Martin McGuinness's death in 2017, he said that he hoped the former IRA leader was "parked in a particularly hot and unpleasant corner of hell".

Norman Tebbit was born in Ponders End, Enfield, in 1931. His father ran a pawnbroker's shop – until he lost his job and got on that bike. He found work as a painter, but money was tight and they moved into cramped rented rooms. Norman won a place at Edmonton County Grammar, and in his memoir, Upwardly Mobile, he recalled that by the age of 14, he had got a paper round and started to reject the "paternalism" of the postwar Labour government. Soon after, he joined the local Young Conservatives – becoming one of its few working-class members.

At 16, he left school to become a copy boy at the Financial Times. There, he was made to join the print union, which fuelled his opposition to closed shops. He did his national service in the RAF. He learnt to fly, and in 1953 he became a pilot with BOAC (and an official in the pilots' union). Around the same time, he met Margaret, a nurse. They married in 1956 and went on to have three children.

Living in Hemel Hempstead, he joined the local Conservative Association, and in 1970, he was was elected as MP for Epping (a constituency that was later abolished and redrawn as Chingford). As a backbencher, he opposed the admission of 30,000 Asians who had been expelled from Uganda, and railed against militant unionism. His loathing of the unions intensified when Margaret, who suffered from severe depression, was unable to get treatment on the NHS owing to strikes. He was, he recalled, determined to break their power – and in 1981, when he became secretary of state for employment, he made that his mission. He regarded the 1982 Employment Act – which greatly restricted the formation of closed shops – as among his greatest achievements.

Then in 1983, when Cecil Parkinson, his friend and cabinet rival, was forced to resign after it emerged that he'd had a long affair with his secretary, Sara Keays, Tebbit took over at the department of trade and industry. In that role, he pushed through many of the privatisations of the Thatcher era.

As party chairman from 1985, he threw himself into Thatcher's 1987 election campaign. But her popularity was by then waning, and he and Michael Heseltine were being mentioned as possible successors. He insisted that his loyalty was total, and she won the election; but relations were strained. Possibly, he told Thatcher's biographer Charles Moore, she found his presence uncomfortable – a reminder of the fact that an IRA bomb intended to kill her had destroyed many other lives.

Retiring to the backbenches enabled him to take several directorships to fund his wife's care. In 1992, he was elevated to the House of Lords (he included a polecat in his coat of arms). He wrote his memoirs, as well as a cookbook, while continuing to make waves with his comments on issues including Europe, gay marriage and immigration. An exasperated William Hague told him: "I have my own cricket test now – if you don't want to be part of the team, then get off the field." Margaret died in 2020, having suffered from dementia. Tebbit made his final appearance at Westminster in 2022, aged 90.