Norman Tebbit, who has finally pedalled off to harangue the angels at 94, was less a politician than a human sledgehammer, forged in the dreary slagheap of Ponders End and polished to a brutal sheen in Margaret Thatcher’s crucible of conviction. Born in 1931, in a corner of London so bleak it could make a lamppost suicidal, Tebbit clawed his way to become the snarling id of Thatcher’s Britain, a man who wore self-reliance like a knuckle-duster. His father, we were endlessly reminded, “got on his bike” to find work in the Depression—a phrase Tebbit wielded like a bludgeon. He was the Tory dream made flesh: a working-class lad who’d traded class solidarity for a hymn to individualism, and never looked back.
As Employment Secretary, Tebbit went for the trade unions’ jugular with his 1982 Employment Act, a piece of legislative sadism that stripped their immunity, mandated ballots for closed shops, and left them cowering. “My finest hour,” he crowed, as if he’d personally drop-kicked Arthur Scargill in the testicles. As Trade and Industry Secretary and Tory Party Chairman, he stage-managed Thatcher’s 1987 election rout with the cold efficiency of a man who’d already alphabetized his vendettas. The “Chingford Skinhead” moniker was a misnomer; his real weapon was a tongue that could flay a bull elephant. Michael Foot’s jibe about a “semi-housetrained polecat” was less an insult than a coronation—Tebbit probably had it etched on his bedpost.
The IRA’s 1984 Brighton bombing was a vicious plot twist, shattering his body and leaving his wife, Margaret, paralysed. That he limped from the wreckage to care for her suggested a heart beneath the polecat’s pelt. As a peer, he morphed into Brexit’s cantankerous prophet, savaging Maastricht with the glee of a man who’d seen the EU’s bureaucracy and mistaken it for Satan’s ledger. His “cricket test”—cheer for England or get out—was a xenophobic zinger that had liberals spitting their fair-trade coffee.
Spitting Image, that glorious carnival of latex savagery, cast Tebbit as a leather-clad bovver boy, a skinhead thug straight from a punk dystopia, snarling Thatcher’s orders with a menace that made Darth Vader look cuddly. The caricature was so gleefully vicious it could have peeled paint; Tebbit, to his credit, took it with glee, once uttering that it was “flattering to be noticed, it actually did me a lot of good” as if he secretly relished the puppet’s spittle-flecked venom.
Tebbit was Thatcherism’s attack dog, loyal to a fault, unrepentant to the last. As he rides his celestial bike into eternity, one imagines him barking at St Peter to deregulate the pearly gates. We shall not see his like again.
As Employment Secretary, Tebbit went for the trade unions’ jugular with his 1982 Employment Act, a piece of legislative sadism that stripped their immunity, mandated ballots for closed shops, and left them cowering. “My finest hour,” he crowed, as if he’d personally drop-kicked Arthur Scargill in the testicles. As Trade and Industry Secretary and Tory Party Chairman, he stage-managed Thatcher’s 1987 election rout with the cold efficiency of a man who’d already alphabetized his vendettas. The “Chingford Skinhead” moniker was a misnomer; his real weapon was a tongue that could flay a bull elephant. Michael Foot’s jibe about a “semi-housetrained polecat” was less an insult than a coronation—Tebbit probably had it etched on his bedpost.
The IRA’s 1984 Brighton bombing was a vicious plot twist, shattering his body and leaving his wife, Margaret, paralysed. That he limped from the wreckage to care for her suggested a heart beneath the polecat’s pelt. As a peer, he morphed into Brexit’s cantankerous prophet, savaging Maastricht with the glee of a man who’d seen the EU’s bureaucracy and mistaken it for Satan’s ledger. His “cricket test”—cheer for England or get out—was a xenophobic zinger that had liberals spitting their fair-trade coffee.
Spitting Image, that glorious carnival of latex savagery, cast Tebbit as a leather-clad bovver boy, a skinhead thug straight from a punk dystopia, snarling Thatcher’s orders with a menace that made Darth Vader look cuddly. The caricature was so gleefully vicious it could have peeled paint; Tebbit, to his credit, took it with glee, once uttering that it was “flattering to be noticed, it actually did me a lot of good” as if he secretly relished the puppet’s spittle-flecked venom.
Tebbit was Thatcherism’s attack dog, loyal to a fault, unrepentant to the last. As he rides his celestial bike into eternity, one imagines him barking at St Peter to deregulate the pearly gates. We shall not see his like again.