LONDON (Reuters) -Norman Tebbit, an outspoken former British politician and loyal supporter of Margaret Thatcher who only just survived a deadly 1984 bomb attack on her government in Brighton, has died at the age of 94.
Tebbit personified hardline Conservative Party values, criticising the trade unions, urging strict controls on immigration, preaching a return to traditional morals and telling the unemployed to go out and look for work.
“Norman Tebbit was an icon in British politics and his death will cause sadness across the political spectrum,” Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch, said on X.
A former RAF and then airline pilot who rose to become a cabinet minister, Tebbit helped mastermind the campaign which gave the Conservative party a landslide election victory in 1987 and Thatcher a third term in office.
He was the most prominent victim of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) bomb attack in Brighton in 1984, which left him lying trapped for hours in the ruins of the Grand Hotel, where the Conservatives had been holding their annual conference. His wife Margaret was paralysed by the blast.
During a discussion on immigration in 1990, he proposed the “cricket test”, the controversial idea of assessing how well those from ethnic minorities had integrated into British society by asking whether they supported England’s cricket team.
“A large proportion of Britain’s Asian population fail to pass the cricket test,” he said at the time, drawing accusations of racism. The idea is now known as the “Tebbit test”.
Portrayed as a leather-jacketed thug by a satirical television programme, Tebbit constantly drew the wrath of leftwingers.
Taking a tough line against riots partly driven by unemployment in the early 1980s, he famously told a party conference that when his father had lost his job in the 1930s: “He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work”.
Tebbit was born in Enfield, north London, on March 29, 1931. His father, who had made a relatively comfortable living as a jeweller and pawnbroker, was put out of work during the depression and was forced to find work as a builder.
Tebbit stepped back from the cabinet after the 1987 general election in order to care for his wife, and did not stand for re-election in 1992. He was given a seat in the House of Lords, Britain’s non-elected upper chamber, and retired from there in 2022. His wife died in 2020 aged 86.
(Reporting by Sachin Ravikumar and Sarah Young; Editing by Kate Holton and Hugh Lawson)
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