Norman Tebbit

Yesterday

Charles Moore

What I’ll miss about Norman Tebbit

This column comes to you from Auckland Castle, former palace and hunting lodge of the Prince Bishops of Durham. We, the Rectory Society, are here by kind permission of its saviour, Jonathan Ruffer, celebrating our 20th anniversary. Jonathan rescued the castle not from the heathen but from the Church of England. The last Anglican bishop to inhabit it was Justin Welby, in his brief year at Durham before being translated to Canterbury, but it had been run down for many years before that. Bishop Auckland is in one of the poorest parts of England but it did not occur to the Church authorities to use the heritage of this astonishing

Thursday

The Spectator

Norman Tebbit was the symbol of an age 

Norman Tebbit, who died this week aged 94, was a self-made man who shouldered his way to the top of a party of old Etonians. He was, to many, the leather-clad bovver boy of Spitting Image, ordering the unemployed to get ‘on yer bike’. He was a devoted husband who stepped back from politics to care for his wife, Margaret, after they were pulled from the wreckage of Brighton’s Grand Hotel. And he was an unrepentant right-winger, who was unflinching about where his party had gone wrong, and unforgiving to the monsters who had put his wife in a wheelchair. This Middlesex grammar school boy turned airline pilot, turned cabinet

John Whittingdale

Norman Tebbit transformed the country for the better

My first job in government was working for Norman Tebbit as his special adviser in the Department of Trade and Industry. I received the call 41 years ago, in the summer of 1984, and it was agreed that I would join him immediately after the Conservative party conference concluded that year in Brighton. He was already a hero of the Margaret Thatcher government. But few saw as close up as I did just how much courage – and compassion – Norman, who died this week aged 94, had. On the final day of that conference, in the early hours, an IRA bomb exploded in the Grand Hotel. Republican terrorists had