They say “never meet your heroes” – but meeting your antiheroes can be absolutely fascinating. At least, that was my experience when I met Norman Tebbit. How could it not have been?
Already branded a “semi-house-trained polecat” as an opposition MP, once in government after 1979, his take-no-prisoners, right-wing persona meant that anyone growing up in the Seventies and Eighties in a vaguely left-leaning household couldn’t help but see him as the Thatcherite thug his puppet played in the phenomenally popular satirical show, Spitting Image.
But there was always more to him than that – which quickly became apparent when, in 2017, we met for a chat over a cup of tea in the House of Lords.
It wasn’t that the so-called “Chingford Skinhead” had mellowed in the sense of resiling from many of his characteristic and sometimes notorious beliefs – he might have admitted that he’d been wrong in his opinion of the Ugandan Asians who’d been forced to flee to Britain in the early 1970s. But he was still clearly sceptical about the willingness and ability of migrants to integrate (the origin of his infamous “cricket test”). And he was still very much a Europhobe, and opposed to gay marriage.
But on a personal level, he was nothing like the bike chain-wielding, leather-clad bruiser I thought I’d grown up with.
True, he was still sharp-tongued – a reminder of his considerable talents as a soundbite politician avant la lettre. But what struck me most was his even sharper political intelligence. Here was someone who, throughout his time as a key figure in Margaret Thatcher’s governments, could go studs-up when required, but was also very much a canny strategist.
In retrospect, and even at the time for those willing to see beyond the stereotype, those qualities played a crucial part in some of those governments’ signal achievements – most obviously, trade union reform, privatisation, and a couple of now-legendary electoral victories.
It’s too easily forgotten, especially if we focus on her titanic struggle with Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers, that Thatcher’s undermining of trade union power was achieved iteratively rather than via one climactic confrontation. And Tebbit (who, don’t forget, had been an official in the airline pilots’ union) had played a vital part in boiling the frog by steering through the second of a string of employment bills, which over time totally transformed the UK’s previously poisonous industrial relations.
Likewise, the selling off of state-owned concerns to the private sector was not achieved by some sort of big bang, but instead accelerated over time. And once again, Tebbit, promoted to secretary of state for trade and industry, played a vital role, overseeing the first really high-profile privatisation – that of British Telecom – which paved the way for the second; British Gas.
By then, of course, Tebbit and, even more so, his wife, Margaret, had suffered terribly in the IRA’s Brighton bomb attack, and had, as a consequence, been switched from the executive to the electoral front line, becoming chair of the Conservative Party in the long run-up to the 1987 contest.
Already no stranger to media appearances (indeed, during the 1983 election, he’d appeared in more broadcast news items than any Tory apart from Thatcher herself), Tebbit not only helped front the 1987 campaign but helped mastermind it, brilliantly integrating the advertising expertise of Saatchi & Saatchi and the political instincts of his boss and his colleagues – even if one them did famously panic about how things were going.
Afterwards, in semi-(house-trained) retirement on the backbenches and in the Lords, Tebbit, like Thatcher, was admittedly a thorn in the side of his successors, particularly on Europe. But the Tories, and admirers of the brand of “Essex-man”, no-nonsense Conservatism which he embodied, and which, sadly for them now, seems to have passed to Nigel Farage, owe him a huge debt of gratitude.
Tim Bale is a professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London and author of ‘The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron’ (Polity Press, £26.99) and ‘The Conservative Party after Brexit: Turmoil and Transformation’ (Polity Press, £18.99)
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