Norman Tebbit
Norman Beresford Tebbit, Baron Tebbit, was a British politician. A member of the Conservative Party, he served in Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet from 1981 to 1987 as Secretary of State for Employment, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Chairman of the Conservative Party. He was a member of Parliament from 1970 to 1992, representing the constituencies of Epping and Chingford.
In 1984, Tebbit was injured in the bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where he was staying during the Conservative Party Conference, by the Provisional IRA. His wife Margaret was left permanently disabled after the explosion. He left the Cabinet following the 1987 general election to care for his wife.
Tebbit considered standing for the Conservative leadership following Thatcher's resignation in 1990 but decided not to as he had earlier made a commitment to his wife to retire from front-line politics. He did not seek re-election as MP for Chingford in 1992 and was given a life peerage as Baron Tebbit, of Chingford. He retired from the House of Lords in 2022.
Early life and career
Born in Ponders End, Middlesex, on 29 March 1931, to working-class parents Leonard and Edith Tebbit, he went to Edmonton County Grammar School, which was then an academically selective state school in north London.At the age of 16, Tebbit got a job with the Financial Times and had to join NATSOPA. Disliking rules that caused members who criticised union officials to be fined or expelled, he recalled vowing to "break the power of the closed shop".
In 1949, Tebbit joined the Royal Air Force for national service. After training, he was commissioned in the rank of pilot officer in November 1950. He transferred to the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in November 1951, to continue his national service on a part-time basis. During his time in the air force, Tebbit flew Meteor and Vampire jets. In July 1954, at RAF Waterbeach near Cambridge, he had to escape from a burning Meteor 8 which had crashed off the end of the runway by breaking open the canopy. After completing his national service, he transferred to the Royal Auxiliary Air Force in April 1952, and was promoted to flying officer.
From 1951 to 1953, Tebbit worked in publishing and advertising. In 1953, Tebbit joined British Overseas Airways Corporation as a navigator and pilot. Initially, between 1952 and 1955, continued to fly in RAuxAF the with 604 Squadron at North Weald in Essex. Of his airline navigation training, he later said: "In those days it was a considerable academic syllabus. You had to be up to speed on spherical trigonometry to get through it". During his time at BOAC, he was an official in the British Airline Pilots' Association.
Member of Parliament
Tebbit was elected as MP for Epping in 1970 and then for Chingford in February 1974. He is recorded as an MP member of the Conservative Monday Club in 1970.Tebbit's first intervention as an MP was to ask a question of the then Minister at the Board of Trade, Frederick Corfield, on 6 July 1970. His question was on the subject of a crash of a Comet-4 aircraft in Spain on 3 July, which killed all the 112 people on board at the time.
In 1975, six men were dismissed from their jobs because of the introduction of a closed shop and were denied unemployment benefit. The Secretary of State for Employment, Michael Foot, commented: "A person who declines to fall in with new conditions of employment which result from a collective agreement may well be considered to have brought about his own dismissal". Tebbit accused Foot of "pure undiluted fascism" and affirmed that this "left Mr Foot exposed as a bitter opponent of freedom and liberty". The next day The Times first leader —titled ""—quoted Tebbit and went on:
Mr Foot's doctrine is intolerable because it is a violation of the liberty of the ordinary man in his job. Mr Tebbit is therefore using fascism in a legitimate descriptive sense when he accuses Mr. Foot of it. We perhaps need to revive the phrase "social fascism" to describe the modern British development of the corporate state and its bureaucratic attack on personal liberty. The question is not therefore: "is Mr. Foot a fascist?" but "does Mr. Foot know he is a fascist?"
During the Grunwick dispute, when workers went on strike over pay and working conditions, the owner George Ward refused to recognise their trade union, and there was a split in the Conservative Shadow Cabinet between the conciliatory approach of Jim Prior, the Shadow Employment Secretary, and Keith Joseph. Tebbit involved himself in that dispute by making a controversial speech on 12 September 1977, in which he said:
Inside Britain there is a... threat from the Marxist collectivist totalitarians.... Just to state that fact is to be accused of 'union-bashing'.... Such people are to be found in the Conservative, Liberal and Labour Parties. Their politics may be different but such people share the morality of Laval and Pétain... they are willing not only to tolerate evil, but to excuse it.... Both Jim Prior and Keith Joseph know that George Ward and Grunwick are not perfect, nor was Czechoslovakia perfect in 1938. But if Ward and Grunwick are destroyed by the red fascists, then, as in 1938, we will have to ask, whose turn is it next? Yes, it is like 1938. We can all see the evil, but the doctrine of appeasement is still to be heard.
Tebbit was accused of comparing Prior to Laval and at that year's Conservative Party conference, he attempted to avoid personalising the issue, and openly splitting the party, without retracting what he had said. Tebbit said of these differences: "I'm a hawk—but no kamikaze. And Jim's a dove—but he's not chicken".
During a debate in the Commons on 2 March 1978, Michael Foot likened Tebbit to a "semi-house-trained polecat" in response to a question from Tebbit asking if he accepted that the legislation being proposed that made it compulsory for people to join a trade union was an act of fascism. After he was made Lord Tebbit in 1992, he chose a winged polecat as a supporter on his coat of arms. Later, in the debate Tebbit asked Foot whether he would "put a bridle on his foul-mouthed tongue".
First Thatcher ministry
After the Conservative Party regained power after the general election of 1979, Tebbit was appointed Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Trade.In the September 1981 Cabinet reshuffle, Thatcher appointed Tebbit as Employment Secretary. This was seen as a shift to a 'tougher' approach to the trade unions than had been the case under Tebbit's predecessor, Jim Prior. Tebbit introduced the Employment Act 1982 which raised the level of compensation for those unfairly dismissed from a closed shop and prohibited closed shops unless 80% of relevant workers approved the arrangement in periodic ballots. It also removed trade unions' immunity from liability in tort – i.e. made trade unions liable for civil damages if they committed unlawful acts, and made injunctions possible against such acts. In his memoirs Tebbit said that the 1982 Act was his "greatest achievement in Government".
In March 2021 Tebbit was reported by The Times to have said, during a Zoom meeting, that Special Branch had regularly spied on union leaders while he was employment secretary.
In the aftermath of the 1981 riots in Handsworth and Brixton, Tebbit responded to a suggestion by the Young Conservative National chairman, Iain Picton, that rioting was the natural reaction to unemployment:
I grew up in the '30s 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.
As a result, Tebbit is often misquoted as having directly told the unemployed to "get on your bike", and he was popularly referred to as "Onyerbike" for some considerable time afterwards.
The former Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once remarked of Tebbit: "Heard a chap on the radio this morning talking with a cockney accent. They tell me he is one of Her Majesty's ministers". Peter Dorey of Cardiff University wrote that "it was Norman Tebbit... who was perhaps the public face or voice of Essex man, and articulated his views and prejudices".
Second Thatcher ministry
The Nuffield study of the 1983 general election found that Tebbit was the second most prominent Conservative on radio and television news broadcasts during the campaign with 81 appearances.In the post-election October 1983 reshuffle, Tebbit was moved from Employment to become Trade and Industry Secretary, replacing Cecil Parkinson, who had resigned. Thatcher had actually wanted Tebbit to become Home Secretary, but William Whitelaw vetoed this.
In 1984 Tebbit was badly injured, with multiple injuries, in the bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where he was staying during the Conservative Party Conference, by the Provisional Irish Republican Army. His wife, Margaret, was permanently disabled.
In 1985, Tebbit was appointed Chairman of the Conservative Party and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, as Thatcher wanted to keep him in the Cabinet. During the Westland affair Tebbit was against the Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation taking over Westland Aircraft. Tebbit opposed the 1986 United States bombing of Libya from British bases and objected to Thatcher's refusal to consult the Cabinet fully on the matter. However, he did criticise the BBC for its supposedly biased reporting of the raid. During the same year, he disbanded the Federation of Conservative Students for publishing an article, penned by Harry Phibbs, following Nikolai Tolstoy's accusation that former Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was complicit in the forced repatriation of Cossacks in the aftermath of the Second World War.
On 13 April 1986, Tebbit and his chief of staff Michael Dobbs visited Thatcher at Chequers to present her with the results of polling by Saatchi & Saatchi which found that with inflation down and the trade unions weakened, "the Prime Minister's combative virtues were being received as vices: her determination was perceived as stubbornness, her single-mindedness as inflexibility, and her strong will as an inability to listen". Tebbit and Dobbs told her this was becoming known as the "TBW factor": TBW standing for "That Bloody Woman". They recommended Thatcher take a lower profile in the forthcoming general election.
A few weeks later, Tebbit gave an interview to John Mortimer for The Spectator where he said of Thatcher:
It's a question of her leadership when our aims aren't clearly defined. When people understand what she's doing there's a good deal of admiration for her energy and resolution and persistence, even from those people who don't agree with her. Now there's a perception that we don't know where we're going so those same qualities don't seem so attractive.Thatcher disagreed and her biographer claims she was suspicious of Tebbit's motives. Furthermore, Thatcher commissioned the firm Young and Rubicam to carry out their own polling, which concluded that Thatcher's leadership was not the problem. Throughout the rest of 1986 and into the 1987 election, Thatcher continued to use Young and Rubicam, which eventually caused tensions with Tebbit during the election campaign.
For quite a while, Tebbit was seen as Thatcher's natural successor as Party leader. During early 1986, when Thatcher's popularity declined in the polls, commentators began to suggest that the succession of the Conservative leadership would lie between Michael Heseltine and Tebbit.
At the 1986 Conservative Party Conference in Bournemouth, Tebbit—along with Saatchi and Saatchi, Dobbs and the Conservatives' Director of Research, Robin Harris—came up with the next party slogan—'The Next Move Forward'. For the first time, the Conservatives employed pre-conference advertising to publicise the new-style conference. Tebbit persuaded Thatcher that ministers would state their objectives that they would achieve in the next three years; Saatchi & Saatchi would use these to design posters, leaflets, and brochures to be deployed as each minister finished their speech. The aim "was that in 1986 the media should reflect the image I wanted—of a Government confident, united, clear in where it was going—and determined to get there". According to Tebbit the conference "was more successful than I had dared to hope... the opinion polls which had us 7% behind in June and still 5% down in September now put us back into first place—a position we never relinquished from then right through the election campaign. The Prime Minister's ratings were immediately restored".
A MORI opinion poll in March 1987 saw Tebbit as second-favourite amongst voters as Thatcher's successor ; however, amongst Conservative voters, Tebbit was the front-runner with. In October 1988, MORI asked the same question, with similar results and amongst Conservative voters. However, Thatcher apparently once told Rupert Murdoch: "I couldn't get him elected as leader of the Tory party even if I wanted – nor would the country elect him if he was".
On 6 January 1987, the journalist Hugo Young published a quote attributed to Tebbit in The Guardian newspaper. Tebbit's chief of staff, Michael Dobbs, responded by writing a letter to the newspaper citing Young's dislike of Tebbit, adding "Perhaps this explains the invention of the quotation he attributed to Mr Tebbit". The quote was "No-one with a conscience votes Conservative". Before this letter was published, however, the words "the invention of" had been removed. Despite publishing this letter The Guardian subsequently repeated the quote, and Young again attributed it to him in a letter to The Spectator. Tebbit feared that if no action was taken against The Guardian the Labour Party would use this quote against the Conservatives in the forthcoming general election. With Thatcher's consent Tebbit threatened the newspaper with legal action if they did not retract the quotation and apologise to Tebbit. The case continued until 1988 when The Guardian apologised, published a retraction and paid £14,000 in libel damages in an out-of-court settlement.
During the 1987 general election, Tebbit and Saatchi & Saatchi spearheaded the Conservative campaign, focusing on the economy and defence. However, when on 'Wobbly Thursday' it was rumoured a Marplan opinion poll showed a 2% Conservative lead, the 'exiles' camp of David Young, Tim Bell and the Young and Rubicam firm advocated a more aggressively anti-Labour message. This was when, according to Young's memoirs, Young got Tebbit by the lapels and shook him, shouting: "Norman, listen to me, we're about to lose this fucking election". In his memoirs, Tebbit defends the Conservative campaign: "We finished exactly as planned on the ground where Labour was weak and we were strong—defence, taxation, and the economy". During the election campaign, however, Tebbit and Thatcher argued. Tebbit had already informed Thatcher at the beginning of the campaign that he would leave the government after the election to care for his wife.
Thatcher said to her friend Woodrow Wyatt on the Sunday after polling day in 1987: "He'll carry the scar of that Brighton bombing all his life. I didn't want him to go. Whenever he is away from her he can't even attend to business properly. He's always ringing up to find out if the nurses are looking after his wife all right". In her memoirs, Thatcher said she "bitterly regretted" losing a like-minded person from the Cabinet.
On 31 July 1987, Tebbit was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour.