If Nigel Farage is the godfather of Brexit, Norman Tebbit was one of its grandparents.
Lord Tebbit’s staunch pro-British sovereignty stance, notably his opposition to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty and support for the “Better Off Out” campaign, paved the way for Brexit and redefined the UK-Europe relationship, even if in the 1980s his generation of Cabinet ministers could not yet imagine Britain would ever leave the bloc entirely.
Tebbit will be remembered as one of the most prominent supporters of leaving the EU and advocates for Brexit in the run up to the 2016 referendum and beyond.
Long after retirement he remained a supporter of right-wing causes in the Tories including becoming honorary president of the Bow Group think tank. He would also regularly rally the European Research Group of Tory Brexiteer parliamentarians.
Back in his heyday in the 1980s, Lord Tebbit enjoyed his reputation as a political bruiser and enforcer, unafraid of confrontation as he helped drive forward the economic and social changes that characterised Thatcherism, a necessary corrective, as the two allies (he and Margaret Thatcher) saw it to the dominance of the trade unions under Labour in the 1970s.
After inner-city riots in Handsworth, Birmingham, and Brixton, south London, Lord Tebbit rejected suggestions that street violence was a natural response to rising unemployment. He told the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool: “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.” The phrase “on yer bike” to look for work still resonates today.
Labour’s hard-left leader Michael Foot famously called him a “semi-housetrained polecat” after Tebbit criticised the closed shop – whereby members of any profession had to join a union. In his memoirs, he recalled breaking this link as his “greatest achievement in government”.
Tebbit will also be remembered for launching one of the first major privatisations by selling off British Telecom, a symbolic moment in the shift away from public ownership. The UK is still debating the merits of the nationalisation of its railways and water companies today.
But a night in 1984 defined the rest of Tebbit’s life. He was one of the victims of the IRA’s bombing of Brighton’s Grand Hotel. Five people died in the terrorist group’s attempt to assassinate Thatcher and her Cabinet during the Tory party’s annual conference.
Norman and Margaret Tebbit were asleep on the second floor; the blast sent their bed crashing two storeys down into the Grand Hotel’s foyer. While he sustained broken bones, his wife was paralysed. He later left his Cabinet post to care for her.
John Whittingdale, a former Conservative Cabinet minister, served as Tebbit’s special advisor at the Department for Trade in the 1980s, taking on the job the day after the Brighton bombing. Whittingdale told The i Paper how for the first fortnight of his new job, Government meetings were taken in the hospital where Margaret Tebbit was being treated.
“In my view, Norman would have become prime minister, had it not been for Brighton. He was seen as the natural successor to Thatcher. He was by far the most popular person amongst the membership. And I think Thatcher would have been happy at the idea of him taking over from her.
“Brighton was really what changed it, and he felt for the rest of his life a sense of guilt that his wife was disabled because of him, essentially. She was in Brighton and staying in the Grand Hotel because he was a member of the Cabinet. That was why he essentially sacrificed his political ambition,” Whittingdale added.
Tebbit was a black and white character. In conversations I had with him in his later years he spoke about his wife Margaret with an unfailing tenderness and love. But he could not forgive the IRA – which never apologised for the atrocity – for what they had done.
It was the other Margaret in his life – Lady T – with whom he will always be associated. He was loyal to the end, even when her Cabinet deposed her in 1990. But in office he often stood up to her, remarking the worst that the then prime minister could do was sack him.
In the 1980s he was nicknamed the “Chingford skinhead,” referencing his Essex constituency and his tough-guy image. On Spitting Image, TV’s satirical puppet show, Tebbit was shown as a leather-clad bruiser who beat up other Cabinet ministers. It was an image he liked because the caricature “was always a winner”, although colleagues said he was usually courteous with political opponents.
Malcolm Rifkind, who served as Secretary of State for Scotland under Thatcher, agreed Tebbit’s bruiser image wasn’t the full story, in an interview with The i Paper.
“He didn’t look particularly agreeable, he had very narrow features and looked as if he was in a bad mood all the time and had very strong and unequivocal opinions. That reputation, to some extent, reflected the man himself,” Rifkind said. “He didn’t take fools lightly, but he was never, in reality, as harsh as he sometimes liked to pretend to be.”
“It’s worth remembering,” Rifkind added, “that it wasn’t just in the Brighton bombing he was injured. He served some time in the Royal Air Force and was trained as a pilot, and on one occasion was almost killed when his plane crashed to the ground, and he survived that. He was a very, very brave man.”
But Tebbit was also a product of his age, proving to be an awkward opponent for most of Thatcher’s successors. He regularly criticised Tory leader David Cameron for his modernising agenda. Tebbit’s views on homosexual relationships were viewed as outdated: as late as 2013 he linked gay marriage to incest.
But he was unapologetic about his views, defending his infamous “cricket test” for immigrants – asking which country they cheer for – right up until the end of his life. Like his Euroscepticism, his anti-immigration stance informed much of the modern debate on numbers.
On Tuesday, after Tebbit’s death was announced, there was an outpouring of grief from modern Conservatives. It showed a fondness for a man who mentored the next generation. But the tributes also contained nostalgia for an age where ideological battles seemed far clearer cut.
Tebbit, born working class, was an upwardly mobile, pugnacious and unbending icon of Thatcher’s capitalist Britain, with all of the ideological legacy – and baggage – that entails.
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