AN INTERVIEW WITH
LORD TEBBIT


The prospect of meeting with Lord Tebbit, formerly one of Margaret Thatcher's right-hand men was an interview to look forward to. Ques-tions I had plenty Ð but to start at the beginning -what about Lord Tebbit's early days? Born in Ponders End, the young Norman was evacuated to South Wales as an eight-year old in 1939. "Hundreds of kids, packed into trains, not knowing where they were going, to be met by unknown men and women standing on the platform 'saying we'll have that one' -an extraordinary expe-rience which all worked without a single social worker and most of us never felt the need for counselling," he said.

"We didn't stay in Cardiff very long because we were getting bombed there and
we thought that being bombed was a family occasion, and came back to London."
And schooling? "I eventually went to Edmonton Grammar School, which as a
mixed school, was very advanced for its day, but sadly it has now descended into a run-of-the-mill comprehensive." Lord Tebbit told me he had a great deal
of admiration for David Blunkett, the pre-sent Education Minister, but thought his
idea of selective education as being every-body going through the same school gates to
be selected inside the school, resulted in enormously large schools with all the prob-lems of indiscipline and relationships between staff and pupils.
"Back in the early post-war era we had potentially the best education system you
could devise," he told me. Lord Tebbit's early career was in the air.
"I went into the Royal Air Force as an 18-year old national service conscript and
was lucky to be one of the small number selected for pilot training. After training, I
flew Meteor jets, which at the time were very advanced fighter aircraft. After demobilisa-tion I joined the Auxiliary Air Force and flew Vampires as well. These were very hap-py
days, because I earned my living flying big, heavy, piston engine aircraft for BOAC -and
on my days off I would dash to North Weald to jump into a Meteor and rush
around the sky -it was enormous fun". "In 1970, after a long, long wait on the way up the seniority list at BOAC, I had just com-pleted
my promotion course and was due to be promoted to Captain at the end of the
summer season, instead of which I found myself in the House of Commons."
And how did that come about? I asked. "I was always very interested in politics
from the time I was at school -I worked for the Conservative Party as a youngster deliv-ering
envelopes and the like. In 1951, a Con-servative Government had been elected so I
felt that I could go away and leave things in the safe hands of Winston Churchill.
"Things began to go wrong in the time when Macmillan was in office in the early
Sixties -in my view he was one of our worst Prime Ministers". "Although by that time I
was married with children, I was so annoyed by some of the things going on that I wrote
to the then Chairman of the Conservative Party, and told him what I thought the Con-servative
Party should be doing. His reply was, that's very interesting, but if you want
these things to be done you've got to come and do them yourself Ð you can't rely on oth-er people. So I scratched the back of my head and thought perhaps I should. I rejoined the
Party and began to take office in the local constituency association at Hemel Hemp-stead,
where I met a guy called Cecil Parkin-son -we both concluded that we should get
into the House of Commons and do some-thing -and that's where I ended up as the MP
for Epping. My Epping constituency was eventually divided and I finished up with
Chingford". By this stage, I felt I could leave Lord Teb-bit
to tell his story without any prompting on my part -which he did.
"Ted Heath was Prime Minister in those days -and let me confess my errors straight
away -I was a starry-eyed European and thought it was a great idea to join the Com-mon
Market. I still think the Common Mar-ket is a great idea, it's similar to what they've
got in America in the North Atlantic Free Trade Area, but I didn't realise that it would
develop into the monster we are now facing. "I was given the job of Parliamentary Pri-vate
Secretary to Robin Chichester-Clark -the last Ulster Unionist to hold office at
Westminster. This introduced me to the problems on Northern Ireland.
"I fell out with Ted Heath -not a terribly difficult thing to do -and chucked in my
hand as PPS and, by the time the Heath Gov-ernment collapsed in 1974, I was quite
severely estranged from the leadership. In fact, during the 1974 election I used to have
nightmares on alternative nights -one night I dreamt that Ted Heath was re-elected as
Prime Minister and the next that Harold Wilson was the new Prime Minister -we fin-ished
up stuck with Harold Wilson which was probably the lesser nightmare of the
two! It was in those days in opposition that I began to work with Margaret Thatcher and
continued do so until 1979 when she became Prime Minister and invited me to


join her government. To those on the left, she is all sorts of wicked things but, if she
and President Reagan had not been in power at the same time we might not have won the
Cold War and enjoyed the stability we have today. There was a tremendous noise to sur-render
towards the Russians when they installed missiles targeted on Western
Europe, including the UK -most of the Labour Party advocated doing nothing and
objected strongly when we deployed cruise missiles in this country". "If we had not
done so, when the Berlin Wall came down it would have been as the Russian troops came
through. By standing absolutely firm, we obliged the Russians to carry on increasing
their defence expenditure which they couldn't afford -we and the Americans


could just afford it, the Russians could not". "No doubt the Russian generals advised
the Kremlin that if it came to war, they would lose. That started the end of the Cold
War," he continued. "When we came into office in 1979, we
were faced with the huge burden of losses from the nationalised industries -all of them
costing us an arm and a leg every week. At that time we had the Post Office Telephone
Service Ð which was always asking for tax payers' money and very inefficient. You may
remember those days, when telephones were rationed and a party line wasn't something
that Teletubbies got from Millbank on their pagers Ð a party line was a telephone num-ber
that you shared with your neighbour. Nowadays, the replacement privatised
British Telecom not only provides all the telephones you want, wildly
cheaper than they were, but also pays more than a billion pounds a
year in corporation tax back to the taxpayers. Back in the old days of
nationalisation, people would have fell about laughing if you said that the
price of electricity and gas would go down every year.


"Can you imagine competitors being allowed for a nationalised industry?
Between us, Margaret and I dealt with the problem of trade unions -remember when
we used to have strikes and power cuts every day? The 'English disease' has gone -and the
unions have been put back in their box, where they should be. Everywhere in the
world, except Cuba and North Korea, Thatcherism is now accepted -you have to
denationalise and liberalise your markets. "A few years ago, people were writing sil-ly
books telling us that unless we did it the Japanese way, the German way, the Indone-sian
way and the like, we would all be bank-rupt here -now look around and see whose
economies are in trouble. The only ones doing well are the Americans and ourselves,
because we run a free market liberal econo-my. Mr Blair doesn't like doing it but he
knows that he has to in order to raise the money for his silly ideas."
Did Lord Tebbit's portrayal by the Spit-ting Image programme annoy him? I asked.
"I didn't see many, although those I did catch in the early series were extremely
good. But as with all programmes of that kind, they ran out of ideas. The great thing is
to know when to stop, but, of course, the Spitting Image boys were all wild lefties and
thought they were doing me a disservice -in fact they did me much good on occasions.
"It's not long ago that I was returning from Merseyside on a Saturday night train
which was full of Millwall supporters -their team had just lost and they were not in the
best of moods. There was I, lined up in the buffet, to get my prepacked, frozen, micro-waved
lasagne, in the midst of this bunch, which could have been a bit worrying, but
they were all super. It was all 'ere Norm, where's yer jacket' -their image of me was
the guy who was going round cracking peo-ples' knuckles and delivering sharp jabs with
a truncheon, but always winning. I think Spitting Image did me an enormous service
in that regard." I moved on to a more
serious subject -the bombing of the hotel in
Brighton -that must have been a watershed
in Lord Tebbit's life? "Yes, it was," was his
instant reply. "If that had not happened I don't
know which way my life would have gone. As it
was, from that time on I knew I had to back off from politics in order to look after my wife, particularly to look
after her financially. Being a Minister in this country is not a way to great riches -if you
are German, French, Belgian or Italian it may be -but not in this country, thank
God," he continued. "I left the Government after we won the
election in 1987 and departed the House of Commons in l992 Ð but not before some
very difficult decisions had to taken in 1990. Not long before Margaret Thatcher
was brought down, she asked me to go back into her Government. Perhaps by declining
I took the wrong decision -perhaps I could have done more to save us from the plague
of Major and Blair which have been so damaging -but I had made my decision, giv-en
my word and couldn't go back on it. Rightly or wrongly I felt that my family
were more important than politics."


I asked about the physical injuries sus-tained by Lord Tebbit and his wife as a result of the Brighton bomb. "My wife was completely paralysed for the first few years -but she has regained quite a lot of abilities, her left arm is now quite useful -she can hold a glass and a fork -the two most important things one can do in life really -but she can't look after herself in any way and without people to look after her she would be dead within days. "She can be reasonably independent at


times, she has a big electric wheelchair, so beware if you are around the Sloane Square
area as you may get mown down by her. I received quite serious injuries in the bomb-ing
-it takes a lot longer to recover from such injuries than you think at the time. I
was back in hospital a year or so afterwards to have more bits patched up and I still have
some problems, but I am just very fortunate in that I am able to do most things that I
want to do." Did this horrendous event affect Lord
Tebbit's view of the IRA? "The only difference it made to me as far
as that is concerned is that it brought a greater understanding of the feelings and
the predicament of other families who have been injured or lost family members as a
result of terrorist campaigns -and I don't differentiate between bombs planted by
Protestants or by Catholics, republicans or unionists. It brought me a much greater
understanding of the problems of disabled people -you may think you understand
their problems but you don't until it actual-ly affects you. The powerhouse of the vio-lence
is the IRA/ Sinn Fein -if their violence ended then so would the rest of the prob-lem,"
he said. And the release of terrorist prisoners -was
this appeasement towards the cause of the IRA?
"The easy way to answer that question is to go to Northern Ireland, ask someone if
you can use their address, then write to the


Labour Party saying you would like to join. "You will get a letter back saying, no,
you can't join the Labour Party because you live in Northern Ireland and the Labour
Party does not organise there -it will sug-gest you join its sister party the SDLP, which
is a Republican party. The policy of this Government is to work for the unity of Ire-land
by consent -and I emphasise that -by consent; which distinguishes it and the
SDLP from Sinn Fein and the IRA. So the answer is that this Government is not
appeasing the IRA -it is working with Sinn Fein/ IRA to promote the cause of republi-canism!


"The Government is always expecting the Unionists to move -hence the release of
prisoners without a single bullet, an ounce of Semtex or a single rifle in exchange, so
the terrorist organisations have been fully restored and remain fully armed. Not very
far in the future will be another referendum


like the 'Good Friday' one, with the ques-tion 'should Northern Ireland join the
Republic'? I have no doubt that if the IRA did not exist, the people of Northern Ire-land
would say no, but with a fully armed IRA in existence, they will be told, as they
were on the Good Friday referendum, that unless you vote 'yes' the IRA will start
killing you again. "It would be consent with the barrel of a
gun". I referred to the members of the RUC
feeling let down following the recommen-dations of the Patten Report. "They are
being sold down the river," was Lord Teb-bit's response. "Were I an RUC police offi-cer
I would be wondering why I had risked my life and so many of my colleagues had
been killed or gravely injured if, at the end of it, the service was going to be broken up
and put essentially in the hands of local police authorities who are representative of the local community Ð now that's a nice prospect in the Bogside isn't it -no doubt
the IRA would help out with keeping order. If I were an RUC police officer I would be
feeling really bitter." Is the Labour Party stealing the thunder
of the Conservatives in the field of law and order?
Lord Tebbit said he would describe it more as passing wind rather than stealing thun-der.
"Its members talk big about dealing with crime and the causes of crime but the
police are finding their hands tied more and more. They are being consistently under-mined
in every possible way, particularly in London after the MacPherson report.
Police have been so demoralised, that I should think that most police officers now
are looking forward more than anything else to the day they can take their pension. I
don't see any policy on law and order which makes any sense from this Government.
New York showed how policing can work -although they had a much worse law and
order problem than London, the authorities have shown by a zero tolerance policy you
can combat crime. We now have the daft idea that petty crime should be overlooked
in order to concentrate on big crime. It doesn't work, because people learn to scoff
at the law by getting away with it. Kids know they can laugh at police -they know
they can ride their cycles along the pave-ment and nobody takes any notice -now in
London you even see motor cyclists do it! This starts a process of people doing their
own thing which engenders a climate which anyone can scoff at the law -it's crazy, you
have to start at the bottom. It is necessary to generate a responsiveness to the basic com-mands
of society -of decent conduct, respect and consideration for your fellow
citizens. Without that, you can forget going for the serious criminals because you will
not get a climate where society will support you in that action.
"That's one of the reasons why there is a tendency now for people to take the law
into their own hands." I asked for the Tebbit opinion on the
view expressed by many of the candidates for Mayor of London that police should not
interfere with gay activities in semi-public places. "It is very wrong for anybody in
government, or even aspiring to be, to say to a police force there are certain things
which are crimes and forbidden under crim-inal law but ignore them.
"Apart from removing discretion from police, what about me as an ordinary citizen
when I go for a walk in the park and come across people doing things which I think is
deplorable and disgusting under the bush-es," he said.
"Or if I take my grandson out and he goes on his own to a public lavatory -is he
expected to see men behaving in a depraved fashion? It is completely unacceptable.
"I don't know why this Government has such a homosexual agenda -there are only four or five in the Cabinet after all and there's probably only two or three per cent
in the population at large, I don't know where their power comes from. It's the same
with the Clause 28 business and the lower-ing of the age of consent. Every focus group
Mr Blair has, every opinion poll, tells him that Cause 28 is wanted by the majority of
people of this country. He persists with low-ering the age of consent, although everyone
tells him that the overwhelming majority don't want to make it legal for dirty old
men to bugger boys of 16 or 17 years of age, yet he persists with it. We are told that
he is willing to use the Parliament Act to push through the lowering of the age of
consent -that Act has only been used once before and that was for the War Crimes Bill
-surely one should not use the nuclear weapon of the parliamentary process for
something like this? It is most extraordi-nary the amount of influence wielded by
the homosexual lobby." And Lord Tebbit's views on "political
correctness"?


"I t's the new form of fascism and thought control. We have seen in the last few weeks the idiotic pos-turing about whether or not we are allowed to discuss the ques-tion of illegal entry into this country under the pretence of seeking asylum," he said. "We are not supposed to call them 'bogus' now, although everybody says that out of every 100 that come and ask for asy-lum, at least 80 are not entitled to it. They arrive here having come through at least four other Euro-pean countries where they
could have sought asylum -so why are they coming
here? The answer is because we are a soft
touch. The irony is that we find ourselves unable to
deal with people who are in real need of political
asylum because of the vast number coming for the
soft touch! I don't blame those who come here to
work or set up businesses and prosper, but there
must be some limit as to how many we can take.
The whole policy is col-lapsing and we are told
that it's not politically cor-rect to talk about it.
"The absurdity of political correctness is everywhere -can you make a joke to a fel-low
employee who happens to be a woman? You have to be jolly careful nowadays when
the first reaction of a woman, who thinks somebody has said something not quite
right, is to rush to the chambers of Cherie Booth in pursuit of a few thousand pounds
in compensation! The first reaction in these circumstances should be the placing of a sharp slap round the face of the guy con-cerned
-who then looks a fool in front of his colleagues -which is what used to happen,
for God's sake. Political correctness is a real danger because it restricts freedom of
speech and we are not allowed to talk about things that are important to people in their
everyday lives." As a Life Peer, how did Lord Tebbit view
the changes in the House of Lords? "The House of Lords worked very, very
well as it was. It didn't challenge the House of Commons because, broadly speaking, it
doesn't have the power to do so. Although Conservatives dominated the House, not
least by virtue of hereditary peers, they inflicted a heck of a lot of defeats on legisla-tion
going through by Tory governments over the years -and in many cases improved
that legislation by so doing. "Okay, so now people say, it doesn't
matter how good a job they are doing, they were the wrong people there for the wrong
reason. So having slung most of them out, there remains the problem as to who should
be there. The present Prime Minister has put more of his friends into the House of
Lords in two and a half years than Margaret Thatcher did in 11. The House is being
packed with people, not all of them to my mind, terribly suitable for the job. Those of
us who are life peers are supposed to be there because we have rendered some great
service to the country -well that's the theo-ry, whether we did or not is another matter -or
because we are expert in some field, perhaps the
arts, sport, industry or sci-ence -but a lot of the peo-ple
coming in now have done nothing. They are
useless people being asked to come in and vote like
zombies in the same way the Government back
benchers do in the Com-mons -it is quite
deplorable. It poses the question of how are we
going to select members in the future -I'm there for
life and have enormous freedom to say what I
think without fear of elec-tors, party whips and the
like -not that I ever had much anyway. If we have
a part elected House, which is what some peo-ple
believe will happen, will my vote be worth more or less because I
am not elected? -it's completely daft. "If we do end up with a completely elect-ed
second house, then it really will challenge the Government. But I don't worry too
much about that, because the way things are going, all the power will be in Brussels
and the Palace of Westminster will be a just a tourist attraction".