Norman Tebbit: ‘Too many people in politics today are rather poor material’

The soothing charm of Bury St Edmunds, with its refined Georgian houses and elegant public buildings, is not a setting one might immediately associate with a man who made his name as the great political street fighter of his generation. But it is in the shadow, appropriately, of the Suffolk town’s great Norman Tower, in one of these handsome houses that another great Norman has chosen to spend his retirement after stepping down from the House of Lords last month: Lord Tebbit, the Chingford Skinhead, the ‘semi-house-trained polecat’, the man who told the unemployed to get on their bikes, the Tory who was more Thatcherite than Mrs Thatcher herself. Tebbit and I have been friends for so long that I can’t recall when I first met him: it was, I think, just before the 1987 general election, when he had returned to be chairman of the Conservative Party after recovering from the devastating injuries he sustained in the IRA’s attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984, during the party conference. The footage of him and his wife Margaret being pulled from the rubble early on that eerily still October morning still has the power to shock; not only had the Tebbits nearly been killed, but Margaret’s injuries were so severe that she spent the remaining 36 years of her life in a wheelchair. 

In all the years I have known Tebbit we have never discussed this life-changing moment, so it is somewhat surreal to hear him today, at 91 – spare figure stooped with age, neatly dressed in a pullover and tie, brilliantined hair white – recollecting such a dramatic event from the serenity of his drawing room.  ‘The bombing did make an enormous difference to me,’ he recalls with trademark understatement. ‘Margaret and I had gone to bed. I’d not really wanted to stay on that Thursday night – I just wanted to get home – but I thought it might look a bit untidy on the platform if I wasn’t there.

We were woken by the explosion – it was not a big bomb, but big enough to destabilise the big brick chimney, which collapsed. Margaret and I were injured, bleeding, tangled up, and I doubted whether we were going to survive.’ He owes his life, he says, to Fred Bishop, a fireman. ‘He was on the lead engine that came out.

They ran through what they thought was sea mist [it was smoke from the bomb] to see the hotel with the front torn out. Fred said to his team, “Chaps, you know the rules, if that was a bomb we can’t go in until the bomb squad have cleared it of booby traps. I think it was a fire in the kitchens, don’t you?” And they said, “Yes, it was a fire in the kitchens.” If Fred Bishop hadn’t done that, a lot more would have died.

Not only had the Tebbits nearly been killed by the bomb in Brighton, but Margaret’s injuries were so severe that she spent the remaining 36 years of her life in a wheelchairCredit: Shutterstock

‘We were semi-conscious, Margaret and I: there are those famous pictures of me being dug out.

A bloke in the back of the ambulance with me, as they took me to hospital, remembers saying to me before he gave me a painkilling injection, “Are you allergic to anything?” and I replied, “Oh yes, bombs.”‘ Tebbit cracks jokes whenever he can. But as he rattles around his big house, there is a sadness about him that suggests life’s heavy toll sometimes catches up.

He was widowed just before Christmas 2020; he and Margaret had been married for 64 years, and their loyalty to one another was fierce. When we speak of Margaret’s death he remains stoical, but the pain is still evident.  ‘It was pretty devastating,’ he says. ‘I woke in the night, put my hand out to her and found she was cold, and that she was dead, and that was quite awful.’ 

The pair met in 1955 when he was a young pilot in the Royal Auxiliary Air Force (RAuxAF) and she a nurse. Young Tebbit had originally, at 16, gone to work at the Financial Times, where, with the help of his school, Edmonton Grammar, he had landed a job putting together the share prices page. ‘The great objective was to see if one could get through an obscene sub-heading for a paragraph,’ Tebbit recalls with a chuckle. ‘All the successes were posted on the wall. Phillips’ rubber soles were very useful in that respect.’ 

After a national service stint in the RAF, however, the appeal of rude headlines had waned. ‘I got bored,’ he admits. He went off to sell advertising, but kept his hand in as a pilot in the RAuxAF, joining 604 County of Middlesex Squadron. ‘I entered another new world – my flight commander was a partner in a leading firm of solicitors, the CO was a Lloyd’s underwriter. I then began to grow up.’ 

Not that his childhood until that time had been without event. Tebbit grew up on the borders of Enfield and Edmonton, where Hertfordshire and Essex meet. His father had fought on the Western Front in the First World War, and the post-traumatic stress, or shell shock as it was then, meant that ‘the rest of his life was just useless.

He couldn’t cope with anything, really.’ It was his mother, the daughter of a butcher, ‘a very tough lady’, who ‘managed everything. 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 was eight when war broke out. ‘Probably my most powerful early memory was being at home with my parents and hearing Mr Chamberlain in 1939 say that Herr Hitler had not responded to his ultimatum, and therefore we were at war. And I remember rushing to the window and looking out to see if things looked any different.  ‘At the beginning of the war, my brother, who’s three years older than me, and I were evacuated to South Wales.

It was so heavily bombed we were brought back home.’ But there was bombing there too: ‘We had a lot of air raids and had to use an outdoor Anderson shelter, which was bloody awful.  ‘Towards the end of the war, during the flying bomb raids, my parents were in the shelter and my older brother and I were sitting outside when we heard a doodlebug. When the engine cut, if you didn’t hear it coming down it was going to be pretty close.

Well, when it came down, the door flew open, and several houses on the other side of the road were destroyed.’

‘The only occasion when I was ever cheered from all sides of the House was when I came back in after the hospital to take my seat’Credit: Keystone

His father’s experiences were what made him choose the RAF for his national service. ‘I didn’t want to risk what my father had gone through. Remembering that we had nearly lost the Battle of Britain, not because we were running out of aircraft, but because we were running out of pilots, I volunteered – I had been highly impressed by the Battle as a child. I got my wings, and started flying Meteor fighters.’ His subsequent return to the RAuxAF sounds idyllic. ‘Somebody once asked me what I did with my childhood.

I replied, “I delayed it.” My childhood was spent growing up in 604 Squadron.’ As he talks about those days it is clear that it was the camaraderie, and the chance to meet people outside his normal suburban circles, that he found the most appealing. Not least because it also led him to Margaret.

He was not entirely oblivious to the opposite sex, thanks to his time at school. ‘It was unusual for those days in that it was a mixed school. There were these girl things, which was interesting because I hadn’t got any sisters, and so one talked to girls.’ Margaret was the daughter of a tenant farmer from Cambridgeshire. They married six months after they met, in 1956, at which point Tebbit decided to put his practical skills to better use in order to fund their married life.

He took a job with BOAC, flying mostly on routes to Africa, the Far East and down to Australia.  Although he had landed an enviable job, the strains on family life were soon apparent once their first son, John, was born in 1958. Like many pilots, Tebbit found he was rostered to be away on special family occasions, and this became more apparent after their daughter Alison was born two years later; William, their third child, was born in 1965.

By that stage Tebbit had taken the initiative. ‘I noticed many pilots would simply call in sick when they wanted to be at home, which was causing chaos. I suggested that we be allowed to take control of our own rosters. We did, and it worked: absenteeism dropped like a stone.

It was a lesson for my life in politics – always look at the roots of a problem and not just its symptoms if you want to solve it.’ Despite this, life with three small children took its toll. After William was born, Margaret suffered from postnatal depression and ended up in hospital, leaving Tebbit in charge of a seven-year-old, a toddler and a newborn. ‘I managed.’ It would not be the last time he would do so. 

A ll his life Tebbit had been influenced by his upbringing, by a clear understanding of the link between effort and reward, and by the importance of seizing opportunities when they presented themselves.  Even before his national service, he became a Young Conservative, because, ‘I realised I was not a statist.’ This was during the period when the Attlee administration, which had ruled since Labour’s landslide victory in 1945, had started to nationalise industries it considered strategically important and to provide cradle-to-grave welfarism. Tebbit had been forced to join a print union when he worked at the FT, and it had given him a loathing of the power of the closed shop.

Everything in his upbringing – not least the self-reliance of his parents – had taught him that it was the growth of the individual, and not of the state or of collectives, that was the key to a successful future. However, during the 1950s and 1960s, the leadership of the Conservative Party did not always think like Norman Tebbit. The parliamentary party had, though, ceased to be the preserve of the privileged classes, exemplified by Ted Heath – from a similar background to Tebbit – becoming leader in 1965.

Tebbit, as a party activist in Hertfordshire, disapproved of Heath’s consensual policies, and increasingly in the late 1960s of his management of the party. In a fit of frustration, he wrote a letter of protest to Iain Macleod, a leading member of the shadow cabinet and former party chairman on whose judgment Heath relied heavily. 

‘After Margaret died I thought whether I should sell this place, and go and live in sheltered accommodation.

Then I realised I might not like that, and I’d have buggered it all up’Credit: Tobias Harvey

Years earlier, Tebbit had been on the selection committee at Enfield that had chosen Macleod. ‘I wrote to him, presuming on our acquaintance, telling him what was wrong, and what should be done to put it right – I was a young man and so knew all these things! He replied that, if I thought things were wrong and I knew how to put it right, why didn’t I go and help them do it? And I remember saying to my wife, “I bloody well will.”‘

This was quite a leap from being an airline pilot, but Tebbit had acquired a taste for wider political involvement at a time when his party wanted people such as him – self-made men and women who could relate to an electorate increasingly full of voters with a similar background. Once he had made his decision, Tebbit threw himself into the process of trying to become an MP. ‘I knew I had to fight a hopeless seat, do well, and then get a safe Tory seat.

I decided the place for me was Epping, which included Harlow New Town, which was a rather Corbynista place,’ he observes. ‘Ninety per cent of the housing was owned by the New Town Commission or the council, and the Labour Party went round at election time to help people put their posters up – or rather, to tell them they were going to put their posters up. ‘I think their majority was seven or eight thousand. We fought a good campaign: Stan Newens, my Labour opponent, was very indignant about my first piece of election literature.

It was a picture of me standing beside a civil aircraft in my uniform, and it said: “Why does a man with one of the best jobs in Britain want to do something else?” The only place where the word “Conservative” was mentioned was in the imprint at the bottom.’ The contest was tight. ‘On the night of the count it became obvious it was close. A recount was called, and I was duly elected: which was not the plan at all.

I woke up the next morning in bed in a hotel in Epping and said to my wife, “Oh Christ, what have I done now?” ‘She was very supportive, but was a bit shattered about it too. It meant a complete change in our life.

She had to go back to nursing to help make ends meet.’

Tebbit on Thatcher: ‘She was a Christian and she had a powerful intellect’Credit:Bettmann

The Tory party of the early 1970s was a turbulent place. ‘It was soon quite clear that Heath was making a balls of it. And Airey Neave took me to one side to ask me who I thought would make a better leader. I said, “I don’t know enough.” He replied, “You’d better come and talk to Margaret Thatcher,” whom I’d never spoken to before.

‘Having met her, I agreed that she was the one. We had quite a long conversation. What struck me about her was that she was the daughter of a lower-middle-class shopkeeper in middle England.

She was a qualified scientist and had worked as one. She was a Christian and she had a powerful intellect. You could guess where she was going to go.’

Since he has mentioned Christianity, it occurs to me that there is another conversation we have never had in all these years, but which, given all he has been through, might be relevant. ‘Do you consider yourself a religious man, Norman?’ He looks especially contemplative. ‘I started off as an atheist and slid across to being an agnostic: I felt that one couldn’t be certain whether God existed, but I thought it would be rather a good idea if He did, and took more of an interest in our affairs. I have gradually slid to being on the believer edge, so I am an occasional attendee at the cathedral here.’

As for whether particular experience of the bomb had affected his view of God, he says, ‘No, I don’t think so. I remember coming round in hospital and finding a nurse sitting next to me. She told me what had happened.

I’d suffered a hell of a lot of injuries – broken collar bone, several broken ribs, some had penetrated my chest cavity and my lungs, several vertebrae though not, thank God, my spinal cord, the top of my left hip, and all sorts of bits and pieces.’ He was moved to Stoke Mandeville to be with Margaret, who was in the spinal injuries unit there. He was made to eat all he could to build up his body tissue. ‘The doctor said to me, “It’s bloody awful food, so to assist you I’ll send you in a case of red wine, which you can keep under the bed.” It was the health service at its best.’

The attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton killed four people and injured 32Credit:PA

Severe though his injuries were, they did not compare with his wife’s. ‘I realised that she was very badly injured right from the beginning.

It was clear that she was never going to walk again.’ It was six months before he could return to work, so he ran his department, with the help of officials, from his hospital bed. Considering the extent of Margaret’s handicap, did he consider leaving public life at once? ‘No.

That would have been to give the IRA another victory… The only occasion when I was ever cheered from all sides of the House was when I came back in after the hospital to take my seat.’  At the time of the bomb, Tebbit was Secretary of State for Trade, running the Thatcher programme of privatisation.

He was seen as a natural successor to her: he had already become ‘the Chingford Skinhead’ – a coinage believed to have been made by Private Eye and, thanks to Michael Foot, also a ‘semi-house-trained polecat’. Did he mind? ‘No. Not really.

It made me laugh. I remember calling Foot a fascist. He was upset about that.

He was even more upset the next day when a newspaper said, “Tebbit was right: Foot is a fascist.”‘ He declined to serve, however, in the cabinet after the 1987 election. ‘It was because of my need to earn more money to look after Margaret.’ Above his desk there is a photograph of Tebbit, sleek and dashing in white tie and tails, looking tenderly at Margaret as she dabs her eyes.

It was taken when she went out in public for the first time after the bomb, at a smart City dinner. One only needed a few moments with Margaret to gauge the extent of her heroism, but Tebbit’s, in overcoming the attempt to murder both of them and then devoting much of the rest of his life to caring for her, is no less immense.  The bombing remained with him.

A couple of years ago, he finally gave up game shooting: I used to see him twice every season at a pheasant shoot in Norfolk where his Danish son-in-law Paul was the estate manager. I can testify to his accuracy – and he was rumoured to mutter ‘Adams’ or ‘McGuinness’ every time he pulled the trigger.   

Despatch boxes, souvenirs of Tebbit’s days in government, sit on display at his homeCredit: Tobias Harvey

‘I was once asked what would I do if I bumped into Adams and McGuinness. I said that as long as I was driving a heavy truck when I bumped into them I would laugh.

The IRA were the great beneficiaries of the Good Friday Agreement. They were all given get-out-of-jail-free cards by Blair, while they continue to prosecute the soldiers who were trying to protect people against the IRA: monstrous, absolutely monstrous.’ He thinks public life has changed ‘for the worse’ in his half-century in Parliament. ‘There have always been bounders of one kind or another.

But now I think there are far more people who have gone into politics with the aim of getting into a job in government, and they have on the whole been rather poor material. There are one or two who’ve got ability and integrity. I think the leader of those is the Chancellor.

But I think you could make a better cabinet, a smaller cabinet, and a cabinet principally of people who had not been career politicians all their lives.’ So what now for Tebbit the polecat? Now that he has retired, will he slide gracefully into the sunset?

He has full-time carers and he is close to his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Tebbit family values remain cast-iron, and all three of his children provide a serious support group for him. He feels comfortable in Bury, and plans to spend the rest of his days there. ‘After Margaret died I thought whether I should sell this place, and go and live in sheltered accommodation.

Then I realised I might not like that, and I’d have buggered it all up. So I’m going to stay here. It’s a lovely house.

I’ve got my office and I’ve got my library, and I get a huge number of emails.’

It seems that there will be no sliding away for Norman Tebbit, whose iron resolve will doubtless cause him to seek controversy outside the Lords just as he did inside it. ‘My coat of arms,’ he tells me with a twinkle as I leave, ‘has a polecat on it.’