In 1984, Tebbit was injured in the Provisional Irish Republican Army's bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where he was staying during the Conservative Party Conference.

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".

[14] On leaving the RAF, Tebbit joined BOAC in 1953 as a navigator and pilot, while initially continuing to fly in the Royal Auxiliary Air Force with 604 (County of Middlesex) Squadron at North Weald in Essex.

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.

[26] The former Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once remarked of Tebbit: "Heard a chap on the radio this morning talking with a cockney accent.

[27][28] 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".

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.

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.

During early 1986, when Thatcher's popularity declined in the polls, commentators began to suggest that the succession of the Conservative leadership would lie between Michael Heseltine and Tebbit.

[37] 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.

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.

"[54] 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".

[56] 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".

[58] 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.

[60] 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".

[64] 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.

Following the election he was granted a life peerage and entered the House of Lords, having been created Baron Tebbit, of Chingford in the London Borough of Waltham Forest, on 6 July 1992.

[66] His former seat of Chingford was aggregated in 1997 with Woodford Green in boundary changes and was held for the Conservative Party by his successor and protégé Iain Duncan Smith.

[67] On 11 August 1992, Woodrow Wyatt noted in his diary: "[Thatcher] also seems to have formed a new alliance with Tebbit who stirs her up and talks a lot of nonsense [about the Treaty].

Gyles Brandreth, a Conservative whip, wrote in his diary: The talk of the town is Norman Tebbit's vulgar grand-standing barn-storming performance on Europe.

Tebbit said that The Movement consisted of a "loose" grouping of thirteen members who had previously supported Kenneth Clarke and Michael Portillo for Party leader.

He blamed "timid" politicians, including members of his own party, for allowing PC language and ideas to take hold in Britain by default.

[79] In an interview with The Times in September 2007, Tebbit said the Conservatives lack somebody of the standing of Thatcher, and said that although it did not matter if Cameron's team were educated at Eton, "what a lot of people will suggest is that they don't know how the other half lives.

[80][81] In February 2008, after a magazine article written by shadow education secretary Michael Gove, Tebbit publicly criticised what he characterised as "the poisonous tree of Blairism", which he said had been "planted" in the Conservative Party front bench.

In an interview for The Big Issue in May 2013, Lord Tebbit said that the coalition government's determination to pass the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill had alienated grassroots Tories.

He also speculated that it could mean that a lesbian queen could give birth to a future monarch by artificial insemination, and that the legislation might allow him to marry his own son to escape inheritance tax.

Tebbit said he was against throwing the Constabulary's name and badge "into the modernisation trash can" and that the RUC had been "the thin green line standing between bloody anarchy and the rule of law".

[103] In a May 2014 interview, he talked about discovering he had been suffering from a form of cardiac arrhythmia for more than 40 years: "The suspicion I had a heart problem caused me to puzzle over earlier incidents in my life," he said, reflecting on his RAF jet fighter crash in 1954.

Tebbit cited White's article (an account of Pauline Pearce's visit to the 2011 Tory party conference) as being "a perfect illustration of my theory of the common ground of politics.

The Professor of English at University College London, John Mullan, has written: "In Spitting Image and probably the middle-class imagination, Norman Tebbit was given an Essex drag on his vowels which he hardly possessed.