LONDON (AP) — Conservative politician Norman Tebbit, a key ally of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in her free-market transformation of Britain, has died at the age of 94, his family said Tuesday.
Tebbit’s son William said he died peacefully at home late Monday. No cause was given.
Tebbit was known for his role tackling the power of Britain’s trade unions during the 1980s, and for his socially conservative and free-market views.
He was famed for suggesting the unemployed should get on their bikes to look for work, and for what became known as Tebbit’s “cricket test” – his 1990 assertion that immigrants could not truly be British until they cheered for England at cricket, rather than India, Pakistan or the West Indies.
Current Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch said Tebbit was “an icon in British politics.”
“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. “He never buckled under pressure and he never compromised.”
A political bruiser known for no-holds-barred attacks on the opposition, Tebbit was nicknamed the “Chingford skinhead” by opponents. Michael Foot, who led the Labour Party in the 1980s, called him a “semi-house-trained polecat.”
However, even Tebbit’s critics praised his stoic response to the Irish Republican Army bombing of Brighton’s Grand Hotel during the Conservative Party conference in 1984. Five people were killed in the bombing, an attempt to kill Thatcher. Tebbit was seriously wounded and his wife Margaret was paralyzed from the neck down.
Elected to the House of Commons in 1970, Tebbit served as employment secretary and trade secretary under Thatcher. In 1985 he was appointed chairman of the Conservative Party, helping Thatcher win a third straight election victory in 1987.
The same year, he stepped down from the government so he could spend more time with his wife. In 1992 he was appointed to the House of Lords, Parliament’s unelected upper chamber.
He continued to speak out, especially on Britain’s increasingly close relationship with Europe, about which he was skeptical. He was a prominent advocate of Britain’s departure from the European Union, an issue that divided his party and the country.
After a 1998 peace accord ended three decades of violence in Northern Ireland, many former militants entered politics, But Tebbit did not forgive. When the former IRA commander Martin McGuinness — who had become deputy first minister of Northern Ireland — died in 2017, Tebbit expressed hope he was “parked in a particularly hot and unpleasant corner of hell for the rest of eternity.”
Margaret Tebbit died in 2020. Tebbit is survived by two sons and a daughter.
