Lord (Norman) Tebbit, Total Politics

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

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Politicians Are Not Labradors: As Margaret Thatcher's attack dog, Norman Tebbit was happy to be respected rather than liked. He tells JAMES SILVER that today's political breed is too keen on being loveable.

As he strode through the throng in Central Lobby on the 11th February 1975, Norman Tebbit’s stomach must have been churning. Then a political unknown, he - and other backers – had just helped snatch an unlikely victory for Margaret Thatcher in the Conservative leadership election.

But while the parliamentary party was plainly in a mood for change, there was little evidence that the blazer-wearers of the Tory heartlands were ready to rally behind a woman in the top job. “We had taken a huge gamble in staking the future of our party on a woman leader,” he noted in his autobiography Upwardly Mobile.

The intervening years seem, if anything, to have hardened his views on the subject. Sitting in an eerily empty Westminster committee room, the 78-year-old Tory peer now adds: “It would have been very much easier to sell to the British electors a man with the same views and style as Margaret – simple as that. But there was not a man with those views, nor with that energy and determination, around, and therefore we took the decision that we should ignore the fact of her gender and choose her.”

That decision propelled Tebbit to the front-line, launching one of the most effective political pairings in post-war British history: Thatcher, the bouffant-haired, single-minded supremo and Tebbit, the snarling attack-dog from Ponders End. Reformers to their fingertips, the duo understood one another instinctively. “We reacted to what was going on around us in the same way,” he recalls. “Others would often characterise [that reaction] as rather robust, but we were always led by what we believed.”

Crucially, Tebbit saw in Thatcher a leader who shared his own conviction that the Conservative party needed to undergo long-overdue and drastic surgery. “There had been quite a strong strand in the party which took the view that the purpose of Conservative governments was simply to ameliorate the damage which had been done by Labour governments,” he explains.

“That’s how we stumbled into the extraordinary state of affairs under the Heath government, where we were solemnly claiming that it was the business of government to decide the prices of pretty well everything from potatoes to Rolls Royces, and the wages of everyone from bus conductors to brain surgeons. To me that was incompatible with commonsense Conservatism. Margaret didn’t believe in it either, and she began to say so.”

Part licensed Fool, part hatchet-man, Tebbit’s role – particularly in opposition – was to do much of his leader’s dirty work. His abrasive, nose-tweaking style famously led Labour leader Michael Foot to brand him “a semi house-trained polecat” – a slur which only served to put its target firmly on the political map. Even today, despite his surprising personal warmth, Tebbit seems to revel in his, cartoonish hard-man image.

“I saw myself as a privateer,” says the former commercial airline pilot. “I could be disowned if necessary by the Establishment, who could say ‘Oh that’s not our view, that’s just Tebbit!’. That was convenient for them and for me, because it gave me greater freedom. It also let me learn to use the parliamentary procedures and the House of Commons as my battlefield to destabilize the Labour government and make the life of ministers thoroughly uncomfortable.”

Does he think Thatcher – and her core team – were truly ready for government, by the time she arrived in Downing Street? The question prompts him to compare Thatcher’s position in 1979 with incumbent Tory leader David Cameron’s today.

“I think by 1979 we were ready,” he replies carefully. “One of the main difference between 1979 and 2009, is that within the party, then, we had an enormous number of men, who were not merely experienced in Government, but also in life. Most of our senior people had been through the Second World War. So they had seen life from a very different angle to those who had spent their lives entirely in peacetime, which is what we’re now looking at. It meant that Margaret could draw on a big pool of talent and experience. It is very different now.”

The next administration will face a far graver crisis today than the problems Thatcher encountered three decades ago, he continues. “Things are a lot worse now than they were in 1979. Back then the economic problems were easily analysed – appallingly low productivity of British shop-floor workers, appalling industrial relations, things of that kind which had to put right.

"Today, I think Gordon Brown is right to say we’re in uncharted waters. And I have every sympathy with anybody at the moment trying to decide on the extent to which we should use policies like ‘quantative easing’ and buying-up toxic debt.”

But there is another “great difference” between 1979 and 2009, argues Tebbit – and it’s one which goes to the heart of UK politics. “In the 1970s, the two major parties, between them, did appeal to the great mass of the British electorate. That is no longer so.

"On almost any major problem facing the country, if you ask the electors who they most trust, you’ll find on the whole it’s about 30% for the Conservatives, about 20% for Labour. But what’s really significant is that on almost every issue, a larger percentage say ‘none of them’. So what we’ve got now is a collapse of confidence in the political system.”

This has been caused, says the former Trade and Industry secretary, by “the narrowing of the width of political debate”. Anyone who doesn’t agree with the prevailing consensus is marginalised and shut out. “The result of that is you now have the three parties dancing on a very narrow strip of political ground.”

He jabs a menacing finger at the door. “And out there, the voters are saying overwhelmingly that there’s very little to choose between the parties, it wouldn’t make any difference which of them was in government, they’re all in it for themselves, they have more in common with each other than us, that the politicians have carved up the system for the insiders.” He adds: “And the emergence of this political class is a very dangerous thing.”

But surely his own leader David Cameron – who has worked only in politics and PR – is an archetypal member of this ruling elite? Tebbit, who supported David Davis’s candidacy in the last Tory leadership race and has criticized the coterie around Cameron for having “no experience in the real world”, is quick to concede the point.

“Yes, David hasn’t done a great deal else outside politics,” he says. “I wish he had done other things, but most politicians haven’t done anything else either now. How does he prove himself until he’s in office? He can’t. So until then he’s an unknown quantity.”

What does he make of the Tory leader’s efforts to reposition the Conservatives and make them more “loveable”? The question elicits a mild sneer. “I’ve never believed that politicians should set out to be liked,” he replies. “The best we can hope for is that we will be respected. Politicians are not Labradors.”

One of the things people most admire in Tebbit is his gift for straight-talking. Nowhere is this more in evidence than when he talks about the IRA bomb attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton - during the Conservative party conference in 1984 - which killed five people and paralysed his beloved wife Margaret. What went through his mind when, 23 years later, he watched the footage of the DUP’s Ian Paisley and Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness cracking jokes on a sofa as devolved power was restored to Northern Ireland?

“I thought why couldn’t this be extended to invite Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden,” he says, anger creeping into his voice. “If the terrorists had not merely said ‘Oh we’re not terrorists these days’ and instead repented, confessed that they were wrong, not merely tactically, but that they were wrong morally in what they had done, then, yes, I could have accepted it.

"But whilst they maintain that what they did was right, that they were right to murder my friends, right to try to murder Margaret Thatcher, right to cripple my wife...” he pauses. “I do have an understandable, I think, difficulty in applauding them for having their arms around the Prime Minister’s shoulders.” He leaves the statement hanging, the scorn in his voice palpable. There is nothing left to say.

LORD TEBBIT: ‘QUICK-FIRE’

JS: What’s your earliest political memory?
LT: September 1939, hearing Neville Chamberlain say that the ultimatum delivered to Germany had been ignored and therefore we were, from that time on, at war.

JS:Who’s your political hero?
LT: Of course, the political hero of my lifetime is Churchill. Of my political life, obviously Thatcher.

JS: And political villain?
LT: Michael Heseltine, for bringing her down.

JS: Which political figures from history would you pick for your perfect dinner party?
LT: I’d have to have Alfred the Great....Elizabeth 1...and just to make sure she was happy we’d have to have Sir Walter Raleigh too. I don’t think I could resist having both Gladstone and Disraeli.

JS: What’s the most hurtful thing a journalist has ever written about you?
LT: Nothing written about me has really hurt me very much. But if someone had described me as ‘insipid’ that would have hurt.

JS: Who has been the best Conservative leader since Thatcher?
LT: I think probably William Hague. He did a gallant job. We were going to lose the 2001 election anyway and it was a pity he was wasted in that endeavour.

JS: Tell me one good thing about the European Union?
LT: That it won’t last. (Laughs).

JS: How important are opinion polls?
LT: I think they are very important. But I always say that the pollsters are rather like the witches in Macbeth. If you remember: “The instruments of darkness tell us truths/Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s/In deepest consequence...”* The pollsters tempt you with trifles, but you’ve got to look underneath what they say to find out what really matters.

JS: Who would you choose between Blair and Brown?
LT: Oh Brown. Because he’s a decent man, a highly principled man. He is not in politics for himself, but because he has a genuine vision for the way he thinks society should be organised. The fact that he’s wrong is a separate matter. Blair I regard as seedy. His conduct in many ways has been quite deplorable. Whether he’s set out to or not, he’s used politics to become extremely rich. I don’t think any of that is true of Brown.

JS: What’s more important character or personality?
LT: Oh character, by far.

JS: What do you think the next general election result will be?
LT: I think the government will lose the election and that Mr. Cameron will become Prime Minister – I would hesitate to use the expression ‘win’ because I think it will be more a case of becoming PM by default.

Posted by James Silver - On Wednesday, April 22, 2009

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