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“... Had It So Good, the first volume of his monumental history of Britain since 1956, big guns like Norman Tebbit continued to lambast ‘the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the 1960s’. Three years later, Thatcher blamed the 1960s for ...”

“... aired and some understanding achieved. Contrast this with Question Time on BBC 1 last night with Norman Tebbit, Shirley Williams and some unidentified industrialist. Tebbit played his usual role of a sneer on legs, snarling and heaping contempt on any vaguely liberal view and the discussion, which was no discussion at ...”

“... Keith Joseph, the transparently pretentious Laurens van der Post, the relentlessly downmarket Norman Tebbit and Alfred Sherman who, though Jewish himself, risked his career to invite the notorious anti-semite Jean-Marie Le Pen to the Tory Conference. The clients include other Conservative ideologues such as Michael Portillo and Peter Lilley and a ...”

“... of public service is feel-good hokum disguising economic self-interest and managerial lassitude. Norman Tebbit derided the ‘insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the 1960s.’ These complaints are not pursued with the fervour they once were by ...”

“... soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious an advocate of anti-German feeling; and Mrs Edwina Currie (‘most of the ...”

“... than demanding that people change their lives – get on their bikes, as Thatcher’s minister Norman Tebbit put it – she made the state seem like a service company, ready to fix people’s problems so that they could continue to live as they pleased. This helped to counter a perception of the world as fundamentally incoherent. No large plan, no ...”

“... other musical forms.’ He goes on to argue for this with all the acumen and none of the irony of Norman Tebbit arguing for the aesthetic claims of page-three girls (Rubens painted naked women, too). Thus Lanza: ‘Judging from their literature, the Greeks were rarely without some kind of perpetual musical soundtrack’; ‘Gregorian chants most likely ...”

“... and young characters made it seem a product of a hypothetical GLC film unit. Small wonder that Norman Stone bemoaned ‘the overall feeling of disgust and decay’ conveyed by the film and complained that Kureishi was inciting a ‘sleazy, sick hedonism’. Audiences disagreed. Costing £600,000 to make, the film grossed $15,000,000 and earned the young ...”

“... been coming under increasing pressure. The Home Secretary’s intervention over Real Lives, the Tebbit attacks on the BBC and Kate Adie over Libya, the sequestration of the Zircon tapes, the Government-inspired attack on Thames Television for their Death on the Rock programme, the appointment of boards on an ‘is he one of us?’ basis – all this has ...”

“... that the cover for a Soviet mole today would be extreme Thatcherite views, an admiration for Norman Tebbit and Roger Scruton, and a subscription to the Salisbury Review. The moment of truth arrived in 1964 when Wilson became prime minister and attempted to impose his own appointee as head of MI5. The service resisted and Wilson backed ...”

“... by doing their best to scupper his premiership. (Cameron was working as special adviser to Norman Lamont, the Tory chancellor, on Black Wednesday. ‘If you cut me down the middle,’ he told an interviewer before the last election, ‘you would find “Exchange Rate Mechanism” written on me like a stick of rock.’) The students in the audience ...”

“... campaign, when her increasing crankiness drove those around her to the brink of despair. (‘Norman, listen to me, we’re about to lose this fucking election, you’re going to go, I’m going to go, the whole thing is going to go,’ David Young, the secretary of state for employment, memorably told the then party chairman, ...”

“... walls of the dining-room: Harold Wilson, Derek Nimmo, David Steel, Jeremy Irons, Clement Freud, Norman Tebbit, Barbara Castle, Elaine Paige, Cecil Parkinson, Nigel Lawson, Robin Day. It’s like being compulsorily inducted into a dinner party from hell, a nightmare mix of half-forgotten careerists and political dinosaurs who can’t switch off. But ...”

“... of the Thatcher period, the climate of economic belt-tightening and union-bashing. Lord Tebbit’s helpful remarks, delivered to a sea of grey heads, at Blackpool in 1981, in the aftermath of the Handsworth and Brixton riots, will have carried a special charge for Barlow. ‘On yer bike!’ Hovis preceded Boris (Mayor Johnson) as sponsor of the cult ...”

“... the regions, the government remains as convinced as its predecessors that the BBC is overmanned (Norman Tebbit used to count the crews that came to interview him), and supportive of the transfer of employment from the BBC to undertrained and casualised independents. What the government has not yet done – but could do – is to declare that the value ...”