Norman Beresford Tebbit, Baron Tebbit (29 March 1931 – 7 July 2025), was a British politician. A member of the Conservative Party, he served in Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet from 1981 to 1987 as Secretary of State for Employment (1981–1983), Secretary of State for Trade and Industry (1983–1985), and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Chairman of the Conservative Party (1985–1987). He was a member of Parliament (MP) from 1970 to 1992, representing the constituencies of Epping (1970–1974) and Chingford (1974–1992).
In 1984, Tebbit was injured in the bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where he was staying during the Conservative Party Conference, by the Provisional IRA. His wife Margaret was left permanently disabled after the explosion. He left the Cabinet following the 1987 general election to care for his wife.
Tebbit considered standing for the Conservative leadership following Thatcher's resignation in 1990 but decided not to as he had earlier made a commitment to his wife to retire from front-line politics. He did not seek re-election as MP for Chingford in 1992 and was given a life peerage as Baron Tebbit, of Chingford. He retired from the House of Lords in 2022.
Born in Ponders End, Middlesex, on 29 March 1931, to working-class parents Leonard and Edith Tebbit, he went to Edmonton County Grammar School, which was then an academically selective state school in north London.
At the age of 16, Tebbit got a job with the Financial Times and had to join NATSOPA. Disliking rules that caused members who criticised union officials to be fined or expelled (and thus lose their jobs), he recalled vowing to "break the power of the closed shop".
In 1949, Tebbit joined the Royal Air Force for national service. After training, he was commissioned in the rank of pilot officer in November 1950. He transferred to the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve (RAFVR) in November 1951, to continue his national service on a part-time basis. During his time in the air force, Tebbit flew Meteor and Vampire jets. In July 1954, at RAF Waterbeach near Cambridge, he had to escape from a burning Meteor 8 which had crashed off the end of the runway by breaking open the canopy. After completing his national service, he transferred to the Royal Auxiliary Air Force (RAuxAF) in April 1952, and was promoted to flying officer.
From 1951 to 1953, Tebbit worked in publishing and advertising. In 1953, Tebbit joined British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) as a navigator and pilot. Initially, between 1952 and 1955, continued to fly in RAuxAF the with 604 (County of Middlesex) Squadron at North Weald in Essex. Of his airline navigation training, he later said: "In those days it was a considerable academic syllabus. You had to be up to speed on spherical trigonometry to get through it". During his time at BOAC, he was an official in the British Airline Pilots' Association.
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 "IS MR FOOT A FASCIST?"—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".
After the Conservative Party regained power after the general election of 1979, Tebbit was appointed Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Trade.
In the September 1981 Cabinet reshuffle, Thatcher appointed Tebbit as Employment Secretary. This was seen as a shift to a 'tougher' approach to the trade unions than had been the case under Tebbit's predecessor, Jim Prior. Tebbit introduced the Employment Act 1982 which raised the level of compensation for those unfairly dismissed from a closed shop and prohibited closed shops unless 80% of relevant workers approved the arrangement in periodic ballots. 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.