The tragedy at the heart of Norman Tebbit’s political career was that, although he personally exemplified the way in which the Conservative party had changed in his lifetime, and articulated the views of an aspirant working class in a way that could have made him a natural heir to Margaret Thatcher, circumstances dictated that he should never become party leader. He did not even stand in the election to succeed Thatcher in 1990.
Lord Tebbit, who has died aged 94, made a typically political calculation in deciding not to enter that contest when Thatcher withdrew in the second round, believing that if he did so he would split the rightwing vote that would otherwise go to John Major, and would thus allow Michael Heseltine to win. But his judgment was also informed by the second tragedy at the centre of his personal life.
He had earlier promised his wife, Margaret, who had been paralysed in the IRA bomb attack on the Grand hotel in Brighton, that he would retire from politics at the next election. He stood by this undertaking, even though she was prepared to release him from it. It was a decision he nevertheless regretted for the rest of his life.
Despite the serious injuries he himself suffered in Brighton in 1984, having fallen through four floors and been trapped for hours in the ruins of the hotel, Tebbit had returned to his job as secretary of state for trade and industry within three months. He remained embittered by the bombing that killed five and injured 31 people.
Even in the extreme circumstances of the bomb scene, however, Tebbit displayed something of his remarkable character. As he was being released by rescue workers, he was asked if he was allergic to anything. “Only bombs,” he said. Afterwards, he acknowledged that “nothing would ever be the same” and recognised that the cost in time and money of caring for his wife would inhibit his own political career path.
Tebbit had a razor-sharp intelligence, a caustic wit and an ability to express the opinions of those who recognised the appeal of the radical Conservatism of Thatcher and whose votes swept her into power in 1979. She regarded him as “tough, articulate and trustworthy”.
He had helped her in her early days as opposition leader and when she won office she immediately appointed him as a junior minister in the Department of Trade. He was briefly a minister of state at Trade and Industry and within two years he was in the cabinet as employment secretary in a reshuffle intended to clear the “wets” from her government.
He was promoted to the job of trade and industry secretary in 1983 and two years later he secured the post he had long sought, as chairman of the Conservative party, now with the added responsibility of delivering Thatcher’s third term.
As a minister, he secured a reputation for flair and competence. Alan Clark, who was one of his junior ministers at employment, thought him “truly formidable” as an operator and he also won the respect of his civil servants. But for the Tory party, Tebbit was something entirely new: he was the embodiment of “Essex man”, not least because he had been brought up on its borders and represented an Essex constituency. He caught the national mood in the working-class electorate of the 1980s in a manner that was still incomprehensible to the paternalist Tories who were still sitting on the green leather benches.
Tebbit was in favour of capital punishment (“only for bad people” he would quip), described himself as “unashamedly sexist” and was unremittingly dismissive of anything that spoke of a permissive society. Although privately courteous, he exuded an air of menace and was portrayed as a leather-jacket-wearing bovver boy on the satirical TV programme Spitting Image. His sometimes thoughtless aggression in debate – he once shouted at a Labour MP who had recently suffered a heart attack “You’ll have another heart attack!” – led him to be nicknamed the “Chingford skinhead”, “Count Dracula” and the “prince of darkness”. The Labour leader Michael Foot called him “a semi-house-trained polecat”.
The basis of his beliefs was that a stable liberal society was one in which individuals accepted prime responsibility for their own actions. Asked once if God existed, he replied: “I’m not sure. He ought to. Things would work better.”
In political terms, he wanted the Tory party’s supporters to be self-reliant, just as Thatcher expounded the meritocratic values of her father’s grocery store. He was also strongly concerned about the need for immigrant communities in Britain to become assimilated in local culture, describing himself as a nationalist who acknowledged the ties of blood and culture.
It was these views that led to two of his most famous contributions to the political lexicon. After the urban riots of 1981, he responded to the suggestion that they were a natural reaction to unemployment, by saying: “I grew up in the 1930s with an unemployed father. He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking until he found it.” This led to the derisory slogan “On yer bike!” attributed to him, although those were words he did not use.
On a later occasion, in 1990, he proposed what he called the “cricket test”, arguing that whether people from minority ethnic (particularly Asian) communities supported the England cricket team, as opposed to that of their ancestral homeland, should be the indicator of their Britishness. This became known as the “Tebbit test”.
Tebbit was born in Ponders End, north London, the second of three sons of Edith (nee Stagg) and Leonard Tebbit. Both sides of the family were in the retail trade and, at the time of Norman’s birth, Leonard was an assistant manager in a jewellery and pawn-broking shop, who had bought his own house and was the proud owner of a motorcycle and sidecar.
These comforts all disappeared when he lost his job, got the bicycle out and moved the family downmarket to a shared house in Edmonton. Edith went into domestic service. Leonard found work successively as a house painter, a munitions worker and then again in retail.
Norman was educated at state primary schools in London and then in Cardiff, where he was evacuated during the second world war for two years from 1940 with his elder brother. On their return, he passed the 11-plus and went to Edmonton county grammar school, where he fought (and lost) his first election, standing as a Conservative candidate in the school’s 1945 mock elections. Aged 15 he joined the Young Conservatives and on leaving school at 16, seeking to be a journalist, he found a job in the prices room of the Financial Times.
In 1949 he was called up for national service with the RAF. He was commissioned as a pilot officer and joined the commercial airline BOAC as a pilot in 1953. He became increasingly involved in the airline pilots’ trade union, BALPA, in which he served as an official, and was frequently involved in clashes over what he saw as management stupidity. Later, he would boast of having both been on strike and having been a blackleg in a dispute with which he disagreed. It served to foster his growing interest in national politics and he sought advice from two men, Peter Walker and Cecil Parkinson, who sponsored his inclusion on the Conservative party’s candidates list and with whom he would later work in the cabinet.
He was selected initially for Islington South West, where he was the candidate for two years before winning selection for the more desirable Essex seat of Epping, which he won in 1970, defeating the sitting Labour MP. That seat was abolished under boundary revisions, and from February 1974 until he stood down in 1992 he was MP for Chingford.
It was only after Edward Heath’s defeat as prime minister in 1974 that Tebbit began to make a name for himself as an antagonistic radical rightwinger who had been seriously troubled by the leftward drift of the party in recent years.
He had briefly been a member of the rightwing Monday Club before being elected to the Commons, but as a new MP confined himself to issues of aircraft safety and security. Once Thatcher had been chosen as leader, however, he quickly established himself as one of her key advisers. He joined the Tory MPs Airey Neave and George Gardiner as members of her so-called “gang of four”, the hardline reactionary plotters of the party, helping Thatcher to prepare for occupancy of No 10.
Tebbit was at his happiest in government in the earliest years. In his first cabinet job, he was given the difficult task of implementing Thatcher’s undertaking to reform the unions, against the backcloth of the unsuccessful attempts made during the Heath government. Tebbit thought that a mixture of “menace and reasonability” was what was required and as a former active trade unionist himself had a proper understanding of what he was dealing with.
He regarded the 1982 Employment Act, which included provision of secret ballots and pre-strike ballots and outlawed closed shops unless agreed by 80% of workers, as his finest contribution to the statute book. At Trade and Industry he energetically pursued privatisation policies and was credited with persuading Nissan to invest in Britain. In the 1983 election he was the second most prominent Conservative after Thatcher to appear on radio and TV during the campaign.
As party chairman, though, he found politics more complicated. A succession of opinion polls had shown that he and Heseltine were viewed as the two main contenders to succeed Thatcher and, while Heseltine was ahead of Tebbit among all voters, the position was precisely reversed among Tories.
Thatcher became increasingly suspicious of his motives and established an alternative power base within Conservative central office under Lord (David) Young of Graffham. Her declining popularity meant the situation did not improve when Tebbit told her the polls showed that “the TBW factor” (“That Bloody Woman”) had become an issue with the electorate. The 1987 election was particularly fraught as a result, but while there was considerable criticism of Tebbit’s political management, he did deliver a stunning third-term victory for Thatcher on exactly the terms he had predicted.
After the election he retired to the backbenches as he had told the prime minister he wished to do. He had financial issues in paying for his wife’s long-term care and wished to earn some serious money from directorships, which he could not accept as a minister. He acquired a host of appointments but also attracted controversy for accepting a position with BT, among others, which he had helped to privatise.
He wrote two volumes of memoirs, and later a game cookbook. But he found “splashing around in the shallow end of politics” soul-destroying and was tempted when Thatcher invited him to return as education secretary in what proved to be the last weeks of her leadership in 1990. His wife had told him that she understood his dilemma and given him the freedom to decide what he thought he should do. He refused the job.
At the time he had already stated, both publicly and privately, his intention to contest the leadership when Thatcher stood down if he believed it necessary to defend her rightwing mantle. Within weeks, he was faced also with that decision. “I couldn’t do that to my wife. I had given her my word and ultimately that was that,” he said.
He was never a quiet or complacent backbencher but was highly visible and increasingly critical of his own government’s policies. He was worried that the party was drifting and became particularly aggressive on its policy towards Europe.
After Major’s election as leader in 1990 and Tebbit’s elevation to the House of Lords in 1992, he became even more outspoken on this issue. He attacked the Maastricht treaty, showed increasing hostility to Britain’s membership of Europe and announced that he supported Ukip in the 2009 European parliamentary elections.
He also plunged into controversies over overseas aid to Africa, civil partnerships and immigration. He was strongly opposed to David Cameron’s decision to govern in coalition with the Lib Dems and once wrote disdainfully of “this dog of a coalition government”. He retired from the Lords in 2022.
Tebbit married Margaret Daines, a nurse, in 1956. The birth of their third child, William, triggered in Margaret a serious case of postnatal depression, as a result of which she was in hospital for months, and Tebbit took long-term leave to care for his family. Margaret later returned to nursing, and had been working at St Bartholomew’s hospital in London on the day before the Brighton bombing.
Margaret died in 2020. Tebbit is survived by their children, John, Alison and William.
• Norman Beresford Tebbit, Lord Tebbit, politician, born 29 March 1931; died 7 July 2025
