Words like “pugnacious” “bellicose” and “irascible” pepper the pre-written obits as they hit the websites this morning – but compare and contrast Tebbit’s sheer iron-clad confidence in his mission to our current Prime Minister’s inability to believe in anything. And of course what Norman Beresford Tebbit really believed in was Margaret Thatcher.
As luck would have it I was on the phone to one of the surviving Thatcherite Big Beasts today when news of the death broke. The Big Beast said: “Norman was above all else an instinctive Conservative. He was extremely belligerent, to the point, and could be quite brutal when necessary. But he was 100 percent Conservative and understood what that meant.
“He had total conviction in Margaret Thatcher and no-one was going to take on Margaret while he was around. Could we do with a few more Normans today? I couldn’t possibly comment.” Tebbit was of course political Marmite. His abrupt, occasionally plain rude, style was beloved of the Thatcherite right and truly loathed by the Guardian-reading left. Indeed Spitting Image characterised Tebbit as sort of Chingford boot-boy… a character Tebbit admitted he rather liked.
But love him or loathe him you had to admit his life exemplified the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” ambition of the Thatcherite Conservatives. Born to working class parents in Ponders End north London, Tebbit achieved great success at his state school and ended up flying the RAF’s fledgling jet fighter planes the Meteor and the Vampire.
A short spell at the Financial Times would oddly inform his life-long hatred of unions, a hatred he used to help win the seat of Epping in 1970. He swapped seats to Chingford in 1974 and remained MP there until 1992 when he realised he needed to step down to take full time care of his wife Margaret who was severely injured in the appalling bombing of the Brighton Grand Hotel by the Provisional IRA.
Lord Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher’s biographer, said he was the “first important personal example of Thatcherism in action because he was the self-made man from the working class and he was unapologetic about that”. And he was right. He and Thatcher reigned through the 80s when a new form of social mobility was still achievable. A little less so today. Apart from the Brighton bomb Tebbit’s legacy – or rather what will be talked about in the pub tonight – falls to two pithy soundbites.
First from a speech to the Conservative Party conference in which he criticised riots over unemployment, telling delegates that in the 1930s his father had not rioted but had “got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking till he found it”. And a second, a more incendiary ad-hoc Britishness test from 1990 in which he suggested: “A large proportion of Britain’s Asian population fail to pass the cricket test.
“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?” The latter feels like an icky suggestion from another age.
Yet the former, given the deep and catastrophic welfare crisis Britain faces, which will surely bring her to her knees if allowed to continue unchecked, feels like very contemporary common sense which I suspect vast tracts of taxed-till-the-pips-squeak Middle England would very much get behind. Conviction politicians like Tebbit, ones who don’t mind if they are hated and do not exist to get “likes” on Insta, ones happy to pronounce it’s “my way or the highway” to voters and rowdy backbenchers alike, barely exist in British politics anymore.
And this, I’m afraid, is our loss.
