Hard man on the right
Baron Tebbit: a thorn in the side of Government and opposition alike
Thatcher's bovver boy, the Chingford strangler, the hardest of the Tory hard men, former fighter pilot and scourge of the wets, Norman Tebbit is undoubtedly one of the most memorable characters of the Thatcher administration. Reliably outspoken, Baron Tebbit of Chingford is a gift to the media in the era of the bruschetta munching Islington android, and even in his present state of semi-retirement can frequently be heard lacerating the hot potatoes of the day over the air.
His reputation for being more right wing than Genghis Khan has not come from nowhere, and when people describe the Tories as "the nasty party" it isn’t unreasonable to suggest they are thinking of Lord Tebbit's calls for the unemployed of Brixton to get on their bikes, or his proposal for immigrants to pass a "cricket test", or even his recent campaigns in the Lords against Clause 28.
A thorn in the side of Government and Opposition alike, he has been outspoken in his criticism of the Government's Gender Recognition and Civil Partnerships legislation, and last year accused Labour of "promoting buggery". Political correctness counts for little in Lord Tebbit's world. However when we meet he is disarmingly friendly showing us into the oak-panelled Pugin tearoom.
We begin with Northern Ireland, an area with which he has been closely involved since the IRA bombing of the 1984 Conservative party conference in Brighton, from which his wife Margaret was left paralysed from the waist down. He is scathing about recent Government attempts to exclude Sinn Fein from the political process following the IRA's involvement in the theft of £26.5m from a Belfast bank in 2004. "The government knows perfectly well who is in the IRA.
There is an implicit understanding that they will not regard it as a breach of ceasefire no matter how many people are murdered, so long as they are not murders across the political divide. But when the buggers raid a bank the Government gets worried- now Sinn Fein and the IRA have money and guns.
Lord Tebbit makes no distinction between the organisations of Sinn Fein and the IRA, and is "absolutely outraged" at the decision to give their MPs office space at Westminster, which, he reminds us, the IRA bombed in 1979, killing Tebbit's colleague Airey Neave, then Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary. "If Airey Neave hadn't been murdered he'd have been Secretary of State. He believed, as do I, that Northern Ireland should be integrated into the rest of the UK.
Since then the devolution of Scotland and Wales has made it almost impossible to have that as an objective. And it’s impossible to have a political solution until you've dealt with the terrorists." One of the leading Eurosceptics in the public eye, it is disconcerting to find that Lord Tebbit's antipathy to Brussels has relatively recent origins.
During the seventies he was very much in favour of entering the common market, and of a centralised European community, he says, "Until I became a minister, and started going to the Council of Ministers. The more I saw the less I liked it." These days he believes that the divide between Britain and Europe is irreconcilable. "We belong to the Anglosphere, not the Eurosphere. There is an absolutely fundamental difference of view on the different sides of the channel.
Regarding the single currency, and the new constitution, Lord Tebbit is unimpressed. "If the ERM was the extended recession mechanism, then the Euro is the eternal recession mechanism." The confusion spread by the government on the subject of the constitution, where some ministers claim it as an important milestone in the process of integration and others brush it off as a mere "tidying up" exercise, narks but does not surprise him.
"The only ones who try to deny that this is a major step are the British. This is not a European constitution. If we sign up to it it will become our constitution." He is also somewhat sceptical about the chances of a fair referendum campaign. "This government doesn't have much affection for fair dealing", he says , and highlights the recent postal voting scandal. "It was obvious from the beginning that postal voting would encourage fraud.
And what about religious minorities? Some of these people will be voting for their wives as well, and there's nothing we can do about it." As former Tory chairman and chief architect of their election victory in 1987, I ask Lord Tebbit how he rates the current state o the Conservatives. "All too often we look like Marks and Spencer, having lost touch with our old customer base. There is too much concentration on focus groups... I've never asked the electors what they wanted me to do.
You listen to what people say, of course, but you have to do what you believe. The electorate may accept it or reject it." He also highlights the recognition problem. "If I or Boris [Johnson] walk down the street we get stopped all the time. This is not the case with most of the shadow cabinet." Something of an understatement - even Michael Howard has trouble naming some of them. With our time nearly up I ask him some Smash Hits questions to finish.
The greatest Prime Minister Of All Time was Winston Churchill "because of the circumstances in which he came into office, and the difference that he made." His favourite book is 1984. His composers of choice are Verdi and Mozart. The inscription on his tombstone would read "Keep off". We leave the tea room, edging our way around Nicholas Soames as we go, a vast galleon with pinstriped sails, about to drop anchor off the crumpet isles.
"I'd better escort you off the premises," says Lord Tebbit genially but with a hint of steel, and he leaves us in back in Central lobby, melting away to a commitee room.
26th May 2005