It was a measure of the extraordinary strength of the character of Margaret Tebbit, who has died aged 86, that, despite the almost total paralysis she suffered as a result of terrible injuries sustained in the IRA bombing of the Grand hotel in Brighton in 1984, she considered herself lucky to be alive. Although left paralysed from the neck down and able to move only one thumb, she was grateful that she and her husband, Norman Tebbit, the Conservative politician, had survived. “I’m lucky to be here and I’ve got a life which was worth keeping,” she said.
She spent two years in hospital following the IRA attack on the British government during the Conservative party conference in October 1984. She fell through four floors and was trapped under the ruins of the hotel for four hours. Five people were killed and she and her husband, then the trade and industry secretary, were among 31 injured. It would be a long time before she would speak of this experience, having endured the long, slow and painful process of rebuilding a different sort of life for herself, but when she did so, she offered a remarkable revelation of her attitude to her physical disability.
When her third child, William, was born in 1965 she had suffered a traumatic attack of postnatal depression. She became desperately fearful, was terrified that she might kill her baby or her older children, John and Alison, and had to spend many months in hospital. Her husband had to take indefinite leave from his then job as a pilot to care for the baby and the two small children. She recovered only slowly, but the condition returned in 1974; she was again in hospital, while Norman Tebbit, by then an ambitious politician, was fighting two elections and running the home. She suffered a further relapse in 1978.
Yet, asked in an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 1995 about her life in a wheelchair, she had no hesitation in asserting that her earlier depressive illness had been far worse than being physically paralysed. “I’m happy and I’m balanced now,” she said, “and I know what it is to be unbalanced and to feel absolutely desperate – and that feeling is far worse because you can’t think straight.”
Her husband had written in his autobiography, Upwardly Mobile (1988), of his admiration for his wife and the fortitude she displayed in seeking to conquer her fear that she would sink back into her illness. After she was paralysed she impressed a wider audience. She did admit to “down days” and to sometimes being short-tempered with her carers, but throughout her life she nevertheless managed to remain extraordinarily positive.
She claimed that she did not have enough extra energy to be angry, even though the Queen, who visited her in hospital, had urged her to get angry. “Sometimes I think back and flinch but it’s a worthless exercise,” she said. It became even more difficult for her when she found that the mobility of the one thumb she could use, and which enabled her to hold a glass and operate her wheelchair, was reducing after 25 years of intense use. She became vice-president of Aspire, a charity which campaigns for those with spinal cord injury.
Born in Ely, Cambridgeshire, she was one of nine children of Elsie and Stan Daines. Her father was a tenant farmer. Margaret left school at 16 and trained as a nurse, and was working at Westminster hospital in London when she met Norman Tebbit in 1955. They swiftly became engaged and were married in Westminster Congregational Chapel the following year. In the early years of their marriage, the Tebbits moved home frequently, which somewhat frustrated Margaret’s passionate love of gardening, but it was an interest she never lost (and she chose Hillier’s Dictionary of Trees and Shrubs for her desert island).
Having recovered from her depressive illness, she returned to work. She had assisted her husband in his parliamentary work by learning to type, but she also later resumed nursing. She was working at St Bartholomew’s hospital in London on the day before the bomb exploded and had travelled to join her husband at the Brighton party conference for the evening party round. They had planned to leave after the prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s Friday morning speech, for a long recuperative weekend in Devon.
Norman Tebbit led the Conservative election campaign as party chairman in 1987 but then stood down as a minister, having promised his wife he would leave the House of Commons in 1992 in order to earn money from a business career to help pay for the costs of her care. It was an undertaking he honoured. After leaving the Commons he was made a life peer.
He survives Margaret, along with their children.
• Margaret Elizabeth Tebbit, nurse, born 24 May 1934; died 19 December 2020
