Norman Tebbit, Thatcher’s ‘enforcer’, dies aged 94

Norman Tebbit, the Eurosceptic, anti-immigration former cabinet minister known as one of Margaret Thatcher’s most loyal supporters, has died aged 94.

- MILLIE COOKE DAVID MADDOX

The Conservative grandee, who served as employment secretary and Conservative Party chair in the 1980s, played a key role in Tory politics for a generation and would remain one of the biggest influences on the right wing until his latter years.

As employment secretary, he took on the trade unions and told Britain’s 3 million unemployed to “get on your bike” to find a job. As Tory chair from 1985 to 1987, he helped Thatcher secure her third general election victory.

A loyalist to Thatcher from 1975 when he was part of the team of right-wing Tory MPs who masterminded her surprise leadership victory, Tebbit would earn the nickname “The Chingford Skinhead” for being one of the hardest Thatcherites in her cabinet.

The Tory grandee was one of the few to relish his Spitting Image puppet, claiming that it helped model his public persona as “Thatcher’s enforcer”.

He suffered grave injuries in the IRA’s bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984, which left his wife, Margaret, paralysed from the neck down.

But the harder side of him was evident in 1990 when he coined the infamous “cricket test” on whether immigrants supported England at the sport as a guide to whether they were really British.

He always maintained that Tory MPs had betrayed Thatcher when she was ousted in 1990 and carried an enmity with Michael Heseltine, whose leadership challenge would force her out, for the rest of his life. The two would later play roles on opposite sides in the Brexit debate. Tebbit returns to parliament in 1985 for the first time since the Brighton hotel bombing by the IRA (Getty)