Lord Tebbit, who has died aged 94, was an uncompromising supporter of Margaret Thatcher during her years in power, in a political career that would change his life in ways he could never have anticipated.
Although his staunch defence of the UK’s first female prime minister did not sit well with some in his early years at the cabinet table, he won universal admiration for his courage in surviving the Brighton bomb IRA assassination attempt on Mrs Thatcher.
His wife, Margaret Tebbit, spent her life in a wheelchair after the attack that killed five people, when Lord Tebbit was seen grimacing in pain in his pyjamas on breakfast TV while being pulled from the rubble by firefighters in the aftermath of the explosion at the Grand Hotel in 1984.
Mr Tebbit, a former airline pilot, was a confirmed supporter of Mrs Thatcher’s project to turn from consensus to what she called “conviction” politics, implementing the policies they believed in rather than trying to keep a consensus with other parties.
In 1981, a year of riots in big cities, he was given a significant appointment as employment secretary with a brief to tackle the trade unions and at the party conference in Blackpool he caused outrage with a speech when he said his father, when unemployed in the 1930s, had not rioted but had got on his bike to look for work.
His speech was portrayed by critics as telling the modern-day unemployed to get on their bikes while other remarks also raised eyebrows, including his “cricket test” suggestion that people from the subcontinent should only be allowed to settle in the UK if they committed to supporting the England cricket team.
His pugnacious style saw him lampooned as a thug by the Spitting Image show while Labour’s Michael Foot once described him as a semi-house trained polecat.
Mr Tebbit’s life would change dramatically on October 12 in 1984 in Brighton at another Tory conference in an outrage of a totally different scale.
Although Mrs Thatcher and her cabinet survived the blast, one Tory MP was killed with four other activists. Lord Tebbit was seen being pulled from the wreckage hours after the explosion had devastated the frontage of the seafront hotel, with his banter with a fireman called Fred audible to the TV audience.
Mr Tebbit’s wife, Margaret, and mother of his three children, survived but spent the rest of her days in a wheelchair.
As well as his employment and trade and industry roles, Mr Tebbit also served as party chairman and chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster before a lengthy spell in the House of Lords in which he took on a more Eurosceptic role, opposing the Maastricht Treaty which further integrated the member states, a position shared by his former boss, Mrs Thatcher and the former supporter of the EU committed himself to withdrawal while on the red benches in 2007.
When he had joined the Lords as Baron Tebbit of Chingford, he chose a polecat for his coat of arms and also enjoyed reminding people of his “cricket test” suggestion when successive governments said immigrants were expected to adhere to “British values”.
