Tebbit was elected as MP for
Epping in
1970 and then for
Chingford in
February 1974. He is recorded as an MP member of the
Conservative Monday Club in 1970. Tebbit's first intervention as an MP was to ask a question of the then Minister at the
Board of Trade,
Frederick Corfield, on 6 July 1970. His question was on the subject of a
crash of a Comet-4 aircraft in Spain on 3 July, which killed all the 112 people on board at the time. In 1975, six men (the 'Ferrybridge Six') were dismissed from their jobs because of the introduction of a closed shop (an arrangement that only union members could be employed) and were denied
unemployment benefit. The
Secretary of State for Employment,
Michael Foot, commented: "A person who declines to fall in with new conditions of employment which result from a collective agreement may well be considered to have brought about his own dismissal". Tebbit accused Foot of "pure undiluted
fascism" and affirmed that this "left Mr Foot exposed as a bitter opponent of
freedom and
liberty". The next day (2 December)
The Times first leader —titled ""—quoted Tebbit and went on: Mr Foot's doctrine is intolerable because it is a violation of the liberty of the ordinary man in his job. Mr Tebbit is therefore using fascism in a legitimate descriptive sense when he accuses Mr. Foot of it. We perhaps need to revive the phrase "
social fascism" to describe the modern British development of the corporate state and its bureaucratic attack on personal liberty. The question is not therefore: "is Mr. Foot a fascist?" but "does Mr. Foot know he is a fascist?" During the
Grunwick dispute, when workers went on strike over pay and working conditions, the owner George Ward refused to recognise their trade union, and there was a split in the Conservative Shadow Cabinet between the conciliatory approach of
Jim Prior, the Shadow Employment Secretary, and
Keith Joseph. Tebbit involved himself in that dispute by making a controversial speech on 12 September 1977, in which he said: Inside Britain there is a ... threat from the
Marxist collectivist totalitarians. ... Just to state that fact is to be accused of 'union-bashing'. ... Such people are to be found in the Conservative, Liberal and Labour Parties. Their politics may be different but such people share the morality of
Laval and
Pétain ... they are willing not only to tolerate evil, but to excuse it. ... Both Jim Prior and Keith Joseph know that George Ward and Grunwick are not perfect, nor was Czechoslovakia perfect in 1938. But if Ward and Grunwick are destroyed by the red fascists, then, as in 1938, we will have to ask, whose turn is it next? Yes, it is like 1938. We can all see the evil, but the doctrine of appeasement is still to be heard. Tebbit was accused of comparing Prior to Laval and at that year's Conservative Party conference, he attempted to avoid personalising the issue, and openly splitting the party, without retracting what he had said. Tebbit said of these differences: "I'm a hawk—but no kamikaze. And Jim's a dove—but he's not chicken". During a debate in the Commons on 2 March 1978,
Michael Foot likened Tebbit to a "semi-house-trained
polecat" in response to a question from Tebbit asking if he accepted that the legislation being proposed that made it compulsory for people to join a trade union was an act of fascism. After he was made Lord Tebbit in 1992, he chose a winged polecat as a supporter on his coat of arms. Later, in the debate Tebbit asked Foot whether he would "put a bridle on his foul-mouthed tongue".
First Thatcher ministry After the Conservative Party regained power after the
general election of 1979, Tebbit was appointed Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Trade. It also removed trade unions' immunity from liability in tort – i.e. made trade unions liable for civil damages if they committed unlawful acts, and made injunctions possible against such acts. In his memoirs Tebbit said that the 1982 Act was his "greatest achievement in Government". In March 2021 Tebbit was reported by
The Times to have said, during a
Zoom meeting, that
Special Branch had regularly spied on union leaders while he was employment secretary. In the aftermath of the 1981 riots in
Handsworth and
Brixton, Tebbit responded to a suggestion by the
Young Conservative National chairman,
Iain Picton, that rioting was the natural reaction to unemployment: I grew up in the '30s with an unemployed father. He didn't riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking till he found it. The former Conservative Prime Minister
Harold Macmillan once remarked of Tebbit: "Heard a chap on the radio this morning talking with a
cockney accent. They tell me he is one of Her Majesty's ministers". Peter Dorey of
Cardiff University wrote that "it was Norman Tebbit ... who was perhaps the public face or voice of
Essex man, and articulated his views and prejudices".
Second Thatcher ministry The
Nuffield study of the
1983 general election found that Tebbit was the second most prominent Conservative on radio and television news broadcasts during the campaign with 81 appearances (after Thatcher's 331 appearances). In the post-election
October 1983 reshuffle, Tebbit was moved from Employment to become
Trade and Industry Secretary, replacing
Cecil Parkinson, who had resigned. Thatcher had actually wanted Tebbit to become
Home Secretary, but
William Whitelaw vetoed this. In 1984 Tebbit was badly injured, with multiple injuries, in
the bombing of the
Grand Hotel in Brighton, where he was staying during the Conservative Party Conference, by the
Provisional Irish Republican Army. In 1985, Tebbit was appointed
Chairman of the Conservative Party and
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, as Thatcher wanted to keep him in the Cabinet. During the
Westland affair Tebbit was against the
Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation taking over
Westland Aircraft. Tebbit opposed the
1986 United States bombing of Libya from British bases and objected to Thatcher's refusal to consult the Cabinet fully on the matter. However, he did criticise the
BBC for its supposedly biased reporting of the raid. During the same year, he disbanded the
Federation of Conservative Students for publishing an article, penned by Harry Phibbs, following
Nikolai Tolstoy's accusation that former Conservative Prime Minister
Harold Macmillan was complicit in the forced repatriation of
Cossacks in the aftermath of the
Second World War. On 13 April 1986, Tebbit and his chief of staff
Michael Dobbs visited Thatcher at
Chequers to present her with the results of polling by
Saatchi & Saatchi which found that with inflation down and the trade unions weakened, "the Prime Minister's combative virtues were being received as vices: her determination was perceived as stubbornness, her single-mindedness as inflexibility, and her strong will as an inability to listen". Tebbit and Dobbs told her this was becoming known as the "TBW factor": TBW standing for "That Bloody Woman". They recommended Thatcher take a lower profile in the forthcoming general election. A few weeks later, Tebbit gave an interview to
John Mortimer for
The Spectator where he said of Thatcher: It's a question of her leadership when our aims aren't clearly defined. When people understand what she's doing there's a good deal of admiration for her energy and resolution and persistence, even from those people who don't agree with her. Now there's a perception that we don't know where we're going so those same qualities don't seem so attractive. Thatcher disagreed and her biographer claims she was suspicious of Tebbit's motives. Furthermore, Thatcher commissioned the firm
Young and Rubicam to carry out their own polling, which concluded that Thatcher's leadership was not the problem. Throughout the rest of 1986 and into the 1987 election, Thatcher continued to use Young and Rubicam, which eventually caused tensions with Tebbit during the election campaign. At the 1986 Conservative Party Conference in
Bournemouth, Tebbit—along with Saatchi and Saatchi, Dobbs and the Conservatives' Director of Research,
Robin Harris—came up with the next party slogan—'The Next Move Forward'. For the first time, the Conservatives employed pre-conference advertising to publicise the new-style conference. Tebbit persuaded Thatcher that ministers would state their objectives that they would achieve in the next three years; Saatchi & Saatchi would use these to design posters, leaflets, and brochures to be deployed as each minister finished their speech. The aim "was that in 1986 the media should reflect the image I wanted—of a Government confident, united, clear in where it was going—and determined to get there". According to Tebbit the conference "was more successful than I had dared to hope ... the opinion polls which had us 7% behind in June and still 5% down in September now put us back into first place—a position we never relinquished from then right through the election campaign. The Prime Minister's ratings were immediately restored". A
MORI opinion poll in March 1987 saw Tebbit as second-favourite amongst voters as Thatcher's successor (Heseltine: 24% vs Tebbit: 15%); however, amongst Conservative voters, Tebbit was the front-runner with (Heseltine: 14% vs Tebbit: 21%). In October 1988, MORI asked the same question, with similar results (Heseltine: 22% vs Tebbit: 15%) and (Heseltine: 20% vs Tebbit: 26%) amongst Conservative voters. However, Thatcher apparently once told
Rupert Murdoch: "I couldn't get him elected as leader of the Tory party even if I wanted – nor would the country elect him if he was". On 6 January 1987, the journalist
Hugo Young published a quote attributed to Tebbit in
The Guardian newspaper. Tebbit's chief of staff, Michael Dobbs, responded by writing a letter to the newspaper citing Young's dislike of Tebbit, adding "Perhaps this explains the invention of the quotation he [Mr Young] attributed to Mr Tebbit". The quote was "No-one with a conscience votes Conservative". Before this letter was published, however, the words "the invention of" had been removed. Despite publishing this letter
The Guardian subsequently repeated the quote, and Young again attributed it to him in a letter to
The Spectator. Tebbit feared that if no action was taken against
The Guardian the
Labour Party would use this quote against the Conservatives in the forthcoming general election. With Thatcher's consent Tebbit threatened the newspaper with legal action if they did not retract the quotation and apologise to Tebbit. The case continued until 1988 when
The Guardian apologised, published a retraction and paid £14,000 in libel
damages in an out-of-court settlement. During the
1987 general election, Tebbit and Saatchi & Saatchi spearheaded the Conservative campaign, focusing on the economy and defence. However, when on '
Wobbly Thursday' it was rumoured a Marplan opinion poll showed a 2% Conservative lead, the 'exiles' camp of
David Young,
Tim Bell and the Young and Rubicam firm advocated a more aggressively anti-Labour message. This was when, according to Young's memoirs, Young got Tebbit by the lapels and shook him, shouting: "Norman, listen to me, we're about to lose this fucking election". In his memoirs, Tebbit defends the Conservative campaign: "We finished exactly as planned on the ground where Labour was weak and we were strong—defence, taxation, and the economy". During the election campaign, however, Tebbit and Thatcher argued. Tebbit had already informed Thatcher at the beginning of the campaign that he would leave the government after the election to care for his wife. In her memoirs, Thatcher said she "bitterly regretted" losing a like-minded person from the Cabinet. On 31 July 1987, Tebbit was appointed to the
Order of the Companions of Honour.
Backbenches As Trade and Industry Secretary, Tebbit had privatised British Telecom in November 1984. He became a director of the company on 3 November 1987; this gave him an additional salary plus shares in the company. In late 1987 and 1988, Tebbit formed a temporary alliance with
Michael Heseltine in campaigning for the abolition of the
Inner London Education Authority, which they succeeded in achieving through a backbench amendment. Tebbit was also prominent in an unsuccessful Conservative backbench rebellion against a Bill to give 50,000 households (around 250,000 people) from
Hong Kong British citizenship. In April 1988, Tebbit caused much controversy when, in front of an audience of South African dignitaries, he accused critics of
South African apartheid of cowardice and "stinking hypocrisy". He said that, although black critics attacked apartheid in South Africa, they did not speak out against violence among black tribes in South Africa. Archbishop
Desmond Tutu was visiting London at the time and called on Thatcher to repudiate the remarks; instead, she defended Tebbit. In April 1990, he proposed the "
Cricket test", also known as the "Tebbit Test", when he argued that whether people from
ethnic minorities in Britain supported the
England cricket team (rather than the team from their country of ancestry) should be considered a barometer—but not the sole indicator—of whether they are truly British: "A large proportion of Britain's Asian population fail to pass the cricket test. Which side do they cheer for? It's an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from or where you are?" Tebbit told Woodrow Wyatt in 1991 that he did not think certain immigrant communities would assimilate "because some of them insist on sticking to their own culture, like the Muslims in Bradford and so forth, and they are extremely dangerous". In August 2005, after the
7 July 2005 London bombings, which were carried out by three young men of Pakistani descent and one of Jamaican descent, Tebbit claimed vindication for these views. In a conversation with Woodrow Wyatt on 19 December 1988, Tebbit said he would not go back into politics unless Thatcher "was run over by the proverbial bus and he didn't like the look of the person he thought might get her job and destroy the work they've done". On another occasion (22 February 1990), Tebbit said to Wyatt that he would stand for the Conservative leadership if Thatcher suddenly resigned; but when
Alec Douglas-Home suggested that Thatcher would not stand at the next election because she must be tired, Tebbit disagreed: "She has got amazing stamina". Following
Geoffrey Howe's resignation from the government in November 1990, Thatcher asked Tebbit to return to the Cabinet as
Education Secretary, but he refused on the grounds that he was looking after his disabled wife. During the
1990 Conservative leadership election, Tebbit was on Thatcher's campaign team with the job of assessing her support amongst Conservative MPs. According to Thatcher's biographer
John Campbell, Tebbit was "her most visible cheerleader ... who characteristically took the fight to Heseltine by holding a cheeky press conference on his
Belgravia doorstep". After the first ballot but before the results became known, Tebbit wanted Thatcher to make a clear commitment to fight the second ballot if her vote fell short of the amount needed to win outright. When Tebbit saw Thatcher on 21 November he told her she was the candidate with the best chance of beating Heseltine. However, Thatcher withdrew from the contest the next day. Tebbit wanted to stand, but never did. Tebbit subsequently switched his support to
John Major. After Major came back from
Maastricht with an opt-out from the Social Chapter and the single currency, Tebbit was one of the few MPs in the debate on 18 December 1991 to criticise the new powers the Community would acquire. He said the government had been on the defensive against "federalist follies" and that Maastricht had seen "a series of bridgeheads into our constitution, into the powers of this House, and into the lives of individuals and businesses". ==After leaving the House of Commons==