Norman Tebbit: ‘Too many people in politics today are rather poor material’

telegraph.co.uk:

after stepping down from the House of Lords last month: Lord Tebbit, the Chingford Skinhead, the ‘semi-house-trained polecat’, the man who told the unemployed to get on their bikes, the Tory who was more Thatcherite than Mrs Thatcher herself.Tebbit and I have been friends for so long that I can’t recall when I first met him: it was, I think, just before the 1987 general election, when he had returned to be chairman of the Conservative Party after recovering from the devastating injuries he sustained in the IRA’s attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984, during the party conference.

The footage of him and his wife Margaret being pulled from the rubble early on that eerily still October morning still has the power to shock; not only had the Tebbits nearly been killed, but Margaret’s injuries were so severe that she spent the remaining 36 years of her life in a wheelchair.

In all the years I have known Tebbit we have never discussed this life-changing moment, so it is somewhat surreal to hear him today, at 91 – spare figure stooped with age, neatly dressed in a pullover and tie, brilliantined hair white – recollecting such a dramatic event from the serenity of his drawing room. ‘The bombing did make an enormous difference to me,’ he recalls with trademark understatement. ‘Margaret and I had gone to bed.

I’d not really wanted to stay on that Thursday night – I just wanted to get home – but I thought it might look a bit untidy on the platform if I wasn’t there.