Opinion Remembering Norman Tebbit, working-class Tory, originator of the ‘cricket test’

In 1981, Norman Tebbit told a Conservative Party conference that his unemployed father didn’t riot during the Great Depression. “He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking till he found it.” This soon passed into the popular imagination as the younger Tebbit’s — Britain’s newly minted employment secretary — panacea for unemployment, despite his clarifications. He would be greeted with shouts of “onyerbike” for years to come. That’s not the only Tebbitism to be mythologised; his “cricket test” is perhaps the most famous internationally — a suggestion that the loyalties of Britain’s Asian population could be judged by which side they cheered for in cricket matches. To top it all is his puppet from the satirical TV show Spitting Image: Margaret Thatcher’s leather-clad, knuckle-duster-wielding enforcer (the real Tebbit later expressed his fondness for the puppet). To the younger generations, he was always more caricature than man, a ghost of the Thatcher years.

As a young man, Tebbit, who died on Monday aged 94, developed the individualistic, pro-enterprise philosophy that would make him a natural fit for Thatcher’s new conservatism — a marked departure from the post-War, Keynesian consensus until then: Nationalised industries, strong trade unions and welfare state. Thatcher’s 1979 victory would see much of this demolished, leaving a legacy that remains deeply divisive. Tebbit played his part, weakening the powers of unions, driving privatisation and, as party chairman, leading a successful re-election campaign in 1987. He retired from frontline politics afterwards to care for his wife, who had been left disabled by an IRA bombing.

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A working-class Tory who died a baron, Tebbit’s life was not without its paradoxes: He developed his animosity for certain union practices early on, but later served as a union official during his career as a pilot and even went on strike. Always a plain speaker and a caustic wit, he was once asked if God existed. “He ought to,” he said.