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Lord Norman Tebbit, one of Margaret Thatcher’s most loyal cabinet colleagues during her premiership and an “icon” to many rightwingers, has died at the age of 94.
Tebbit became a scourge of the left during the 1980s as he drove forward Thatcherite reforms such as curbing trade union powers and notoriously dismissed the idea that high unemployment had caused urban riots.
“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,” Tebbit said in a 1981 speech.
The Tory politician, who was from a working class north London family, was attacked by some left-wingers as heartless, but his message distilled the central Conservative ideology of self-sufficiency and resilience.
Tebbit was also the most famous victim of the IRA’s bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984, which left his wife paralysed from the neck down for the rest of her life.
Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, said Tebbit was “an icon in British politics” and his death would cause sadness across the political spectrum.
“He was one of the leading exponents of the philosophy we now know as Thatcherism and his unstinting service in the pursuit of improving our country should be held up as an inspiration to all Conservatives,” she said.
Tebbit, who attended a grammar school as a boy, started his working career aged 16 at the Financial Times.
“I was just a kid. I started in the prices room calculating the indices. You probably have to be a graduate in statistics to do it now but, in those days, we used to crank them out on a hand-held calculator with a book of logarithms,” he later recalled.
Soon after, he was commissioned into the RAF for national service and subsequently became a commercial pilot.
Tebbit was first elected in 1970 as MP for Epping and soon earned a reputation as a right-wing ideologue. During a debate in 1978, Labour’s Michael Foot labelled him a “semi house-trained polecat”.
As a Thatcher loyalist he was rapidly promoted inside government to become employment secretary from 1981 to 1983, trade secretary for the following two years and then party chair from 1985 to 1987.
Tebbit was seen as a tough Thatcher enforcer, although friends admired his dry wit and strong principles. He was often portrayed by the satirical Spitting Image television show repeatedly coshing disobedient members of the cabinet with a rubber truncheon.
He believed that his greatest achievement was the Employment Act of 1982, which made it more difficult for unions to create closed shops within workplaces. He later oversaw the privatisation of British Telecom in 1984.
Tebbit did not stand in the 1992 general election and instead was elevated to the House of Lords.
He was a prominent Eurosceptic, who won a rousing ovation from Tory party members at the 1992 annual conference as he urged then prime minister John Major to ditch the Maastricht treaty. Major ploughed ahead despite a bruising Tory rebellion on the question.
In a 2009 Lunch with the FT, Tebbit criticised the then Conservative leader David Cameron for “planting the poisonous tree of Blairism” within his party and racing to the centre ground.
But he also said: “I will be a Tory until I die, whether I am in the party or not.”