'I knew Norman Tebbit - one thing made him stand apart from today's MPs'

I got to know Norman “The Terrible” Tebbit well in the 1980s, when he was tasked with taming the unions as Thatcher's Employment Secretary.

He was given the job after James Prior, an affable Suffolk farmer, was demoted for being too soft on militant labour leaders.

His briefings for journalists like me were laced with characteristic acid humour, joking that he was “a friend of the unions”. In fact he believed it, arguing that compulsory strike ballots enfranchised rank-and-file members.

In private he was polite and courteous but waspish when he felt like it. He once promised to trap my fingers in the gate of his home in the next door street to where I lived in Berhamsted, Herts.

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But in his no-nonsense autobiography of 1988, Upwardly Mobile, he described me as “the left-wing but very straight labour correspondent of The Times”.

He also praised me for identifying his 1983 Green Paper on further curbs as a naked bid for votes that could be kept on the boil right through Thatcher's second election campaign.

As a journalist who relied on top-level contacts in the labour movement, these were back-handed compliments I could do without.

Tebbit was not the kind of man you would want to go to the pub with, but in an era of milk-and-water politicians, I have to concede that this slightly-built, nattily-dressed man was a towering figure in the turbulent years of the 1980s.

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His cutting grasp of language, almost the equal of Michael Foot, who called him “a semi-house-trained polecat” would have made him the journalist he always wanted to be.

And he showed he could make use of the jest, by putting a winged polecat on his coat of arms when he was ennobled in 1992. Which of today's politicians would do that?

Sayings by Norman ‘Onyerbike’ Tebbit

• “I grew up in the '30s with an unemployed father. He didn't riot. He got on his bike and looked for work and he kept looking till he found it.”

• Does God exist? “I'm not sure. He ought to. Things would work better.”
• “We have imported far too many immigrants who have come here not to live in our society, but to replicate the society of their homelands.”
• “A large proportion of Britain's Asian population fails to pass the cricket test. Which side to they cheer for? Are you still harking back to where you came from, or where you are?”
• “On the miners' strike : The scale of the closures went too far.”
• “I am not a union basher.”

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