Thatcher's true believer Norman Tebbit was a bruiser until the very end

Norman Tebbit was one of Margaret Thatcher's true believers and one of her most loyal allies.

In a Conservative party full of old Etonians and toffs, he was also one of very few cabinet ministers from a working-class background. Politics latest: UK and France will get 'tangible results' on migration, President Macron says He once told me, when he was party chairman in the mid-1980s and I was working for The Sunday Times, about the snobbery in the party.

"They think I eat peas off my knife," he said. I think he was joking.

He revelled in his reputation as a working-class bruiser. Labour's Michael Foot called him a "semi house-trained pole cat" and he was widely known as "The Chingford Skinhead".

During the riots of 1981, he famously spoke of his father being unemployed in the 1930s. "He didn't riot," he said.

"He got on his bike and looked for work." I've been reporting at Westminster since 1982 and covered the Thatcher era when Norman Tebbit was a giant on the political stage throughout. When I started as a political journalist he had just been promoted to the cabinet in Mrs Thatcher's momentous reshuffle late in 1981.

That was the reshuffle in which Mrs Thatcher purged the so-called "wets" in her cabinet and appointed true believers like Tebbit, Cecil Parkinson and Nigel Lawson. Like many incoming governments, hers had struggled in the early days, though perhaps not as badly as Sir Keir Starmer's is at the moment! In the early '80s, though, inflation and unemployment were both rampant.

Even after the 1978-79 "winter of discontent" that brought down James Callaghan's Labour government, strikes were still crippling industry. Mrs Thatcher decided radical action was necessary.

So she handed Tebbit the job of employment secretary: his job was to tame the power of the trade unions. He succeeded one of the cabinet "wets.