Lord Tebbit’s response to Michael Gove’s Spectator article last week is a remarkable spectacle: an argument between a past colossus of Tory Government and a future one. To the irritation of some of my fellow modernisers, I have a deep respect for Norman and thought it was especially crazy of that faction to try and expel him from the party in 2002. He is not, as some mods claim, the Scargill of the Right: this is a man who took on the unions and won, drove through many of the key Thatcherite reforms and was responsible for some of the party’s most remarkable electoral achievements. He is also a hero of the fight against the IRA, and has made huge personal sacrifices to care for his wife, horribly injured in the Brighton bomb. So a bit of respect please, gentlemen.
That said, I think his anxieties about Michael, expressed in a letter to the new issue of the magazine, are misplaced.
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