Lord Tebbit still pulling in the crowds
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There are not many former politicians who can draw a crowd, particularly on a wet Sunday night in Bury St Edmunds.
But the Chingford skinhead can. Lord Norman Tebbit, former minister, Conservative Party chairman and chief attack dog for Margaret Thatcher is a man people still want to listen to.
He and his wife have been living in the Suffolk town for the last year or so and both keep a relatively low profile. But for one night and one night only the man who was last in government in 1987 agreed to take part in a fund-raiser in aid of Bury's Theatre Royal.
For nearly three hours he spoke about his life in politics and answered questions from local students, none of whom was even alive when he was a government minister.
He spoke about being born in a down-market suburb of London in 1931 ("two mistakes: wrong place, wrong time"), his time as an airline pilot, his years with Margaret Thatcher ("I did have the odd row with her") and how the Brighton Bomb changed his life for ever ("Sometimes things don't go the way you plan. You just have to make the most of what life offers you").
There were many humorous and candid observations:
Gordon Brown was "a decent man, a moral man, I had a lot of time for him, it's just that he was always wrong".
He thought his party didn't win an overall majority this year because it kept apologising for the past: "Rubbishing your own party as the nasty party is not a good idea, it didn't do Gerald Ratner's company any good and it didn't do our party any good".
The Prime Ministerial debates were "shallow and over-rehearsed" and as for today's Conservative Party: "You can't have a party that relies on focus groups to tell it what to think. You need a gut feeling and a view of what you want to do. And if no one agrees with you then tough, you've just got to go out there and sell it."
To applause he added: "The task of a politician is to make popular what is right not to make right what is popular."
Lord Tebbit is concerned that politics these days has become too bland. He points out that both Labour and the Conservatives are polling some three or four million votes below their natural strength. The days when governments won elections with 14 million votes are long gone.
"What worries me is that in search for the common ground we are all in danger of becoming Liberal Democrats and that is making more and more people feel disenfranchised. That is the way minority extremist parties come to the fore."
The questions from the students were varied: Could the man whose father got on his bike to look for work justify the new tough rules on welfare? ("Sometimes you need tough love"" was the reply); what did he think of the plans to increase tuition fees? ("Unfortunate but necessary"); the importance of tackling the deficit? ("We're now paying more on the the defecit than on education, it's madness") and if you can join the army at 16 why not lower the voting age to 16? ("It's easy to die for your country at 16, it's much harder to decide how it's run at that age").
He admits to being disappointed with the coalition and wishes his party would move faster on some of its key policies. He also believes the Liberal Democrats are probably finished as a party and the pro-coalition elements of them will merge with the Tories in due course.
Not surprisingly there were a few attacks on Europe and the standard of teaching in schools these days but his arguments were so clearly and carefully put that even those in the audience who claimed not to be fans found themselves agreeing with him.
It was a reminder of a time when politics wasn't just about soundbites and photo opportunities but about passionately held and well-argued beliefs.
He was introduced at the start of the evening by the local MP David Ruffley who described Lord Tebbit as "a political hero and legend".
How many of today's politicians will be described as such in 20 years time?
Welcome to the political blog for the East. I'm Deborah McGurran, the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's Political Editor for the region. From Lowestoft to Luton, this is the place for politics with an eastern twist.
Comment number 1.
At 23rd Nov 2010, Kieran wrote:Some interesting opinions. I don't agree with many of them, but a useful viewpoint nonetheless. I do wonder if he is right about the Tories losing because they kept criticising their own past; my only experience of that time was constant Labour attacks of it while in power, and I never thought the Tories as are matched that, but if they constantly rubbished their own past it probably did sometimes to no more than remind people already inclined to dislike them to make sure they came out to vote against them.
He is probably right about the Lib Dems being finished, though unlike him I think that is a shame. Tebbit actually says he fears 'we' are in danger of becoming LDs, which just seems to buy into the idea we can and should only ever have two parties vying for office and anything else is just fence sitting or window dressing. But people generally don't seem to be able to separate the idea of coalition compromise with betrayal, and that will kill LDs if it keeps up.
He's right about politics being shallow, but though I'm too young to recall his own day, no one of my acquaintance seems to think it was any less shallow - it's just how it is presented that has changed. That may be more over rehearsed and reliant on sound bites, but the fundamental political behaviours seem the same, and the people who peddle them no mroe or less passionate. That they take more care how their passion is presented does not make their passion false, only more annoying.
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Comment number 2.
At 23rd Nov 2010, IPGABP1 wrote:Another middle class upstart that served the ruling class well.After the part he played during the eighteen wasted years the Tories were in office, they suffered their worst defeat since 1832.
When Theresa May talked about the'nasty party' I am sure she would have had ' the semi-house trained polecat 'in mind.
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