Lord Norman Tebbit, an uncompromising right-wing British politician who was once considered to be a potential prime minister, died on Monday.. He was 94.
His son William said in a statement to the BBC that Lord Tebbit had “died peacefully at home.” He did not give a cause of death.
Lord Tebbit, a member of Parliament from 1970 to 1992, was a leading figure in Margaret Thatcher’s government but abandoned high office to tend to his wife after she was mostly paralyzed in a hotel bombing by the Irish Republican Army, in which he was also badly hurt.
Michael Dobbs, an author, former close aide to Mr. Tebbit and fellow member of the House of Lords, told the BBC he had confirmed the death with the family. “Norman has been frail — or was frail — for quite some time, and sadly it’s almost a relief for his wonderful family and for Norman himself,” he said.
Well into his 80s, Lord Tebbit — ennobled as a baron in 1992 — retained the ability to project himself into the public eye, both as a blogger and from the red leather benches of the House of Lords, Britain’s unelected upper house of Parliament. From both platforms, he sniped at his opponents and at members of his own party who did not share his uncompromising views. He resigned from the Lords in 2022.
In the 1980s, as a minister and, initially, a close ally of Ms. Thatcher, he took a lead in her campaign to crush the power of labor unions. He “personified the cruel, uncaring side of Thatcherism,” the columnist William Leith wrote in The Independent in 1993. “He was the man who seemed to have no sympathy for slackers, but every sympathy for a rather vulgar kind of nationalism.”
When Britain faced riots ascribed by some to unemployment, Mr. Tebbit remarked caustically that his own father had been jobless in the 1930s but that he “did not riot.”
“He got on his bike and looked for work,” he said.
In his 1988 autobiography, “Upwardly Mobile,” Lord Tebbit described his trade union legislation, enacted in 1982, as “my greatest achievement in government” and called it “one of the principal pillars on which the Thatcher economic reforms have been built.”
Defying proponents of multiculturalism, he drew clear distinctions between what he termed his island “tribe” and outsiders.
Norman Beresford Tebbit was born on March 29, 1931, in Enfield, north London, the son of Leonard and Edith Tebbit. His father was a pawnbroker and jewelry shop manager who later unsuccessfully ran a pub and worked as a house painter. His modest, “drab and gray” origins gave him a particular affinity with ordinary voters, Lord Tebbit said.
He had a long spell as a pilot at the British Overseas Airways Corporation, the state-owned long distance carrier which was a precursor to British Airways. He married Margaret Elizabeth Daines, who had worked as a nurse, in 1956. They had three children: Alison, John and William.
A full obituary will be published later.
Paul Lewis contributed reporting.
After a long career as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times based in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, Alan Cowell became a freelance contributor in 2015, based in London.
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