Macron arrives in London for Starmer’s Brexit surrender

0:02The Telegraph.

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1:44President Macron has touched down in London. He's spending the day with the royal family. He's heading to the Houses of Parliament and then he'll be sitting down with Keir Starmer to talk AI, tech, small boats and everything else you can imagine to bring these two men together. We'll be joined by our Europe editor, James Crisp, who can tell us what to expect. And I'm going to be talking to Charles Moore about the life and legacy of the late Norman Tebbit, one of the great figures in Margaret Thatcher's government. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Tim Stanley. And me, Clea Watson.

2:26President Macron is in London this week meeting the royal family. And of course, Keir Starmer is wasting no time trying to cosy up to the French president. The PM is hosting a summit in central London with Macron, bringing French and British business bosses together to talk trade and tech. And of course, small boats. But before that, he's been looked after by the royal family, beginning with the Waleses meeting him at the airport. Happily for us, we're joined by our European editor, James Crisp, who can tell us everything we should expect. James, what is the summit basically about? What's the point of it?

3:01Well, I mean, first of all, I think we should take a moment to recognise that Jupiter, as Mr Macron likes to call himself, has landed in his little plane. He arrived in a tiny plane. Does he need a little plane to descend from Mount Olympus? I'm not sure. I think it just sort of comes down on the wings of angels. But I mean, if you ask me what this is about, it's about declaring an end to the Brexit wars. I don't need to tell you guys this. But of course, since the referendum, Anglo-French relations have basically been the worst, certainly in my lifetime. And I'd say probably longer. It isn't that long ago that French and British ships were shadowing each other off the coast of Jersey during a row over fishing.

3:50It's not very long ago that Emmanuel Macron was calling Boris Johnson a clown and a knucklehead. Or Liz Truss was saying the jury was out on whether he was friend or foe. I mean, you know, a lot of this is handbags. And look, I think it's fair to say that one of the reasons why France and England have always been sort of best of enemies is we've actually got quite a lot in common. It's almost the rage of Caliban seeing his own reflection in the glass. Both insist on speaking their own language in a loud voice. Both insist that their country is a globe-trotting world power, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

4:32So this is the reset of all of that. But Starmer doesn't want that because he hates that kind of narrow-minded English nationalism, doesn't he? Well, he wants a reset. And look, and let's be honest, right? It is a bad time for Europe's two Western nuclear powers to be at each other's throats about, I don't know, fishing licenses. It is a bad time for two countries with similar values to be at daggers drawn, you know, when they're both in the UN Security Council. You know, we've got a war in Ukraine. Yeah. I mean, that really does sort of concentrate minds. And that is, you know, that is one of the things that this is about.

5:09We've seen since Starmer came in, him and Macron have basically set up the coalition of the willing. Because we don't only have a war in Ukraine where you have Putin, but you also have increasing anxiety about U.S. security guarantees for Europe. And let's be scrupulously fair, Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer have stepped up and tried to do something. They haven't done the classic EU thing of waiting for everyone to come together and be on the same page. They took a political risk of going forward and saying, we are setting up a coalition of the willing. Here is our standard. Who's going to follow us?

5:45And some countries have. Canada. Other countries are sort of a little bit further behind, like Italy. Germany has sort of come in and joined France and Britain on this coalition of the willing. And look, this is the sort of thing that Britain should be doing. You know, forget about Brexit. Brexit happened quite a long time ago now. We're seeing a situation where Britain has finally, after quite a long period of chaos and after quite a lot of infighting, is sort of returning to a more normal role, its normal historic role as a major power in Europe and working together on issues with the French and the Germans like Ukraine.

6:27But, and there is, of course, a but, because while they're working together on this, that doesn't mean, for example, that the French are going to stop being French. So, for example, we signed this UK-EU defence security pact as part of a reset. That enables us to take part in EU defence funding initiatives. We can compete for the big hundreds, billions of pounds worth of loans. But, you know, the French still want to put certain restrictions on those. So, you know, they want to ensure that there is preferential terms which would encourage people to buy European. So what's European? Well, if you're French and it's in defense, I mean, where are the big arms companies in the EU?

7:10There is a definite sort of sense that, look, there needs to be some visuals. There needs to be a statement of unity, which I think we can all agree with. But, you know, that is not separate from the fact that Emmanuel Macron has a longstanding vision for how he would like Europe to work. He calls this the multi-speed Europe. So you have the EU members at their core, the 27 members of the core, and they are dominated by France and Germany. And then at varying degrees outwards, you would have other countries. So Switzerland would be quite close because it takes on EU rules. Norway is an EU rule taker.

7:49You'd have Albania, which wants to join. I mean, you go further out, so you have Ukraine, which wants to join. And over time, you can move closer or further away from Brussels. It's the EU, but it's a French-dominated EU. And I mean, you have to bear in mind that the French attitude towards the EU, they see it as a vehicle for amplifying French power and preserving French influence on the world stage. You know, we made the decision that being outside of the EU was a way to amplify power and ensure sort of an outsized influence on the world stage. But I think this summit is very much about him cementing us in one of those rings, rewarding Keir Starmer, one for hosting the European Political Community Summit, which was a Macron idea, rewarding him for coming to a reset with the EU, rewarding him for agreeing to give up 12 years of British fish.

8:42And I mean, as we discussed last time I was on with you, Tim, you know, 12 years without a negotiation, which is one of the few forms of leverage that we really do have in negotiations with the EU, where they, you know, actually care about their fishermen or at least are afraid of their fishermen, is quite a lot of leverage to give up. And James, sorry, rewarding him with what? Well, warm words, first and foremost, and something on migration, something on small boats. And that's not nothing, right? That is quite a difficult thing for Macron to give up. You have to bear in mind, Emmanuel Macron is in a situation where the largest single party in the National Assembly is Marine Le Pen and her national rally, who are anti-migrant, who have a very tough line on migration.

9:30So the idea that he would come to some sort of arrangement where he would take back people who are leaving France, the channel migrants, back into France, will carry a political cost for Macron. But at the same time, he will be able to say, but for each one we take back, you will take one back into the UK. Now, that would be done, I believe, under family reunification rules, which are established, but this would sort of formalise it and speed it up. But forgive me, James, it still sounds like it's just the words. You said it's the warm words Keir is getting and a deal on asylum. But to most Brits, the deal on asylum makes no sense.

10:12Because first of all, if someone's coming here illegally, they're coming here illegally. They should just be expelled. They shouldn't be expelled and then we'll take someone else. That amounts in most Britain's minds to two people end up coming here, not just one. How can we possibly say that this is a reward to our prime minister? Because there's no legal base. There's no legal base to legally return a channel migrant to France since Brexit. Right. So those rules just don't exist. So you can't do it. I mean, what you can't, you could start doing illegal pushbacks, I suppose. But I don't think people would want us to do that, because people would drown.

10:48And people, you know, and it's just not what a sort of a sensible grown up country would do. Yeah, but people just want the expulsion. This is the problem. When everyone says, so yes, but you can't. But then what about this? But people just, I'm sorry, most British voters just here, they should just be kicked out. Whether it be the Rwanda plan, Albania, like other European countries are experimenting with. I just don't get how anyone, Starmer or Macron, can in their minds see this as a reward that we end up taking an additional asylum seeker from Paris. Yeah, I mean, it's one for one, isn't it?

11:21It's one for one. The first one shouldn't have been here on the first race. But the first one, but the idea would be, and I'm not a reward, I'm not saying this is a person who is arriving. The difference would be that that is a genuine asylum seeker as opposed to an economic migrant who has broken the rules. But again, what Starmer doesn't understand is that public opposition to immigration is about numbers. It's not that people are going, oh, but I will take people if they have a good claim to be here. No. They may say that to pulses. They might lie. But actually, the real thing is they just want fewer people coming overall.

11:53Of course, the other thing is that we're probably not going to be able to have that deal even announced. Because one of the things is that if you're taking people back into France, then presumably that would mean they are then subject to the EU's Dublin regulation, which means they can be returned back to the first safe EU member state, i.e. Italy or Greece or Malta or Spain, where they arrived. So the way that the migration flows work is people will come over, say, across the Mediterranean, they arrive in Italy, and then they head west. You know, They try and get to Germany or they try and get to France and from France they go to Britain But what we used to be able to do is return one of those migrants from Britain to Italy It didn't really work, but you know if the system worked on paper That's what you could do in theory Spanish the Italians and a few other Mediterranean countries like the Greeks have real concerns that if you set up this deal with Britain Then they're going to start having to take back loads of migrants Who have left the EU?

12:55Now, does this mean that there's not going to be a deal? No, I don't think so. I've spoken to people, sources of the European Commission, and they have asked for clarifications. They have asked, you know, for basically for reassurances about how this would work. But at the same time, in the reset, Ursula von der Leyen and Keir Starmer agreed to look at innovative and practical solutions to solving the channel crossings. One of the incentives for Macron to sort of put Britain sort of under pressure because of Brexit is now gone. You know, when he became French president, he beat Marine Le Pen. Marine Le Pen gloried in Brexit, didn't she?

13:33You know, national rally councillors, they named one street, Rue de la Brexit. You know, I mean, they were thrilled. They were thrilled. Yes, I think it's so, you know, and she said, oh, we will have a Frexit referendum. We'll have a Frexit referendum. Now, Emmanuel Macron is a clever man. He thought, right, OK, I'm in. I'm going to have to fight Marine Le Pen in five years time. You know, what are the things that I can hit her on? If Brexit is a failure, I can say that she wants us to suffer as much as the British have. And that is, you know, that was the political reasoning behind it. And you saw that in the campaign in 2022.

14:11She is plotting Frexit by stealth. You know, by this time, of course, it was such a painful sort of negotiating process. But Marine Le Pen said, oh, no, I don't actually want to have a Frexit referendum. You know, so I mean, look, Macron can't run again. So, you know, it is now he can do this. And what is particularly good is he is now going to be arriving in London. He's going to look like a world leader at a time when he is a lame duck at home, where he can't do anything domestically, where he has been humiliated over pensions reform to a greater extent, I would say, than Keir Starmer's being humiliated over his attempts to reform welfare.

14:52The problem with the migrant boat crossings is it's a domestic issue, a very visceral and obvious domestic issue on both sides. And I think both men have to come away. It can't be warm words, it has to be something concrete. And both men are facing... I mean, I don't know if you can still call National Rally an insurgent right-wing party. But, you know, they are facing a, I know it's difficult sometimes to call Le Pen right-wing, but, you know, certainly she has some right-wing policies. Well, and Nigel Farage has some left-wing ones. Exactly. You know, there is a definite similarity as well, actually, between sort of Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen.

15:32You know, I mean, I remember when I was in Brussels, when they were both MEPs there, you know, they would have talks. They did discuss sort of teaming up, buddying up. And Farage made the decision that at that point her party was too toxic. Yes. Because of Marine Le Pen's very, very, very toxic dad. And she now cannot run for president. No, but she's appealing that. Right. Explain why she can't run. Well, she can't run because she was found guilty of embezzling EU funds when she was an MEP. Right, which, by the way, is what the MEPs call a salary. I mean, that's just how it works, right? That is what MEPs do.

16:09I think one of the great tragedies of Brexit is I will never get the chance to be an MEP. Yes. I mean, there's a pair of shoes I've had my eye on for quite some time. I mean, look, the fact is that what she is, what she's been found guilty of, is using funds, EU funds, which are meant for pan-European campaigning, for national campaigning in France. So she may well be banned from the next election. She may be, in which case Jordan Bardella steps in, who is about, I want to say he's 27, but he's either 27 or 29. He's extremely young. He's untested in that sense, at that sort of level. I mean, it's...

16:51In the same way that Reform Hazir Yusuf, there's been an inkling of a softening of Front National's racial approach. Yeah. Jordan Bardella was recently in Israel. And he's not the only, if we're going to use the term, hard right European politician who is allying themselves with Israel when in the past, of course, people on the extremes of the right tended to be more on the anti-Semitic sort of side of things. So there's definitely been an evolution in European politics, quite a surprising evolution in European politics, where most of the anti-Semitism now seems to be on the hard left. Key thing is the same way that Starmer promised us adults back, grown-ups, calm, consensus, etc.

17:32And actually, politics one year on has remarkably splintered into extremes. Under Emmanuel Macron, which was supposed to be populism as centrism, someone who could govern from the centre and create a new sort of weight in French politics, actually, it's turned out he's had one government after another, and now we're not quite sure who could be the next president because there are so many radical options. And that's it. And his party is built around him. Right. I mean, you know, he is the guy who did it. Right. He's the guy who walked out of the socialist government. Francois Hollande's government said, I am an economics minister most people haven't heard of.

18:08And he did it. And as the disruptor supreme, went all the way to the Elysee. And then after that, you know, he sucked the lifeblood, if you like, from the centre-right parties, the Repubblica and the Parti Socialiste. You know, they came to him because power. Right. So you have these two big beasts of French politics who get eviscerated of basically pathetic husks of what they once were. And who's left? Those fringes, they somehow become more powerful. He's created the National Rally in a way. He's created a Mélenchon group. He's radicalized those fringes. But this fragmentation of politics is something which we've even seen in Germany as well.

18:54We've seen it here as well. I don't know why it's happened, but it is a trend across Europe. Yeah. We do still have the royal family to provide stability. We do. And it's an interesting element of these incoming state visits that obviously Macron is a president, so he deals with the head of state, the king, who I'd be interested to know what you think of this, both of you, but when I was in government, Her Majesty, the Queen was still on the throne, and these things are always a negotiation between Number 10 and Buckingham Palace on state dinners and so forth. But I really feel like the king has put his stamp on this quite profoundly.

19:33I mean, it helps that he actually speaks fluent French, which I don't think the prime minister does. But he sent his son and his daughter-in-law to go to the airport to meet Macron and his wife. They're doing a parade through Windsor Castle. They're having their state banquet this evening and there are lots of personal touches. he's found bits and pieces in the royal archives to show him from France. They're going to look at the horse that Macron gave the late queen and so forth. One of the sort of problems for Starmer is that with a much more sort of expansive king on the throne who really minds about knitting together Europe and strengthening our position internationally, is that it is down to Starmer to really get something out of this summit.

20:15And he's not a showman, so it's sort of right that everything is done with the royals, but he really has to be able to roll up his sleeves and sit down in the next couple of days and have something concrete come out of this because otherwise all the sort of pomp and ceremony and excitement is sucked up by the rules, which is, you know, we want to see what the Princess of Wales is wearing. I don't care what Keir Starmer's wearing, now that he pays for it himself. Yeah. They're still not very good suits. No, no, but maybe he will never get that right. But it does, you know, all this symmetry, as I think you could probably call it.

20:49He and Macron enjoy, they seem to enjoy a lot and seem to be good at. But it's now coming down to proper agreements, proper decisions, real nuts and bolts stuff. That's not for today, though. No, but it is tomorrow. So we have a showbiz day today. But then, unfortunately, everyone will say, has this been a summit of two halves? If Keir Starmer can't sort of match the glitz of today with something very, very solid. Well, you're going to struggle to match the glitz of today with a load of announcements about nuclear energy, school exchanges and AI. But not least because people care about small boats more than anything.

21:27So finally, is this all a bit of a dry run for the US state visits in the autumn? Because if there's one thing you can bet, Donald Trump will find it very important that he gets even better treatment than Emmanuel Macron. I think that less substantive will be agreed when Donald Trump comes to town and there will be more showbiz. More words. More words. More self-congratulation, congratulating each other. I think it'll be... You will actually claim that no one has had a state visit ever before. No one has spoken this room. I mean, look, I think the thing is, you know, I wouldn't minimize the importance of this.

22:07it's the first time an EU head of state has visited Britain since Brexit. And, you know, I am pretty certain that if I was Keir Starmer, I'd be talking to Emmanuel Macron about how do I make sure Donald Trump likes his state visit? Because Emmanuel Macron got Donald Trump in for his second state visit almost immediately. And he made him front and center as he reopened Notre If you think back to the men's first terms, Emmanuel Macron gave him a military parade. The military parade Donald Trump still bangs on about and did his own far worse version of. So, you know, if I was Keir Starmer, I'd take advantage of the rapprochement to take Manu to one side and go, you got any tips, mate?

22:54James Crisp, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Coming up next, I shall be joined by Charles Moore to discuss the life and legacy of Norman Tebbit, who has sadly died.

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25:48Welcome back. Norman Tebbett, a prominent member of Margaret Thatcher's cabinet, has died at the age of 94. As Employment Secretary, he helped to break the union's closed shop. As Head of Trade, he privatised British Telecom. He had a fearsome reputation. Frank Johnson, my predecessor as sketch writer, described him as the Chingford Strangler. Spitting Image presented him as a cockney bother boy with brass knuckles.

26:20Lord Tebbett, as he later became, actually revelled in that image, because he liked the idea of himself as tough and principled. But it belied a conscientious man who spent much of his life caring for his wife Margaret, who was left paralysed by the Brighton bomb planted by the IRA in 1984. When I was a young man, Norman worked as a blogger for the Daily Telegraph, and it was a pleasure to interview him. I found him to be courteous and kind. He would reply to comments on his blog as if each one were a letter from a constituent. I'm joined now by Charles Moore, Lord Moore, who wrote the biography of Margaret Thatcher.

26:56Lord Moore, Norman Tebbit was born in 1931 to a working-class family near Enfield. He really embodied Thatcherism, didn't he? He did, including not only in his background but in his character, because his character was the sort of character which he admired, which is to face adversity boldly and to be honest as you rise in the world about your background, not to be ashamed of it, and indeed to see it as a source of strength. And I think from that background he brought a sort of directness which would be harder in a politician from a grander social background. And sometimes traditional conservatism has felt a bit bad about itself, if you know what I mean, because it's connected with privilege.

27:44Norman Tebbett didn't see it that way at all. He was a vigorous conservative and he wanted the benefits of conservatism to distribute much more widely. And he was himself a beneficiary and exponent of that conservatism. And that was extremely powerful politically. For people who may not have been around, they might think the Conservative Party has always had a Thatcherite philosophy. It hasn't. And in the early 80s of Margaret Thatcher's first cabinet, she really had to fight very hard to get her ideas implemented. And Norman Tebbit had a critical role in that, didn't he? You're quite right, he did.

28:19And particularly critical in that year when he made his famous speech about getting on your bike, because he'd just been put in the cabinet the month before. and everybody, all the wise acres, 365 economists had written to the Times to say that the Thatcher experiment was a failure and the 1981 budget had been extremely controversial and Mrs Thatcher was being destabilised within her own party by the so-called wets. So Tebbit arriving on the scene for the first time as a cabinet minister, he'd been a junior minister, really made a key difference at this point and you could hear that new voice very powerfully.

28:56I 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. Listening back to that, to be precise, he wasn't telling the growing ranks of unemployed, it's all your fault. He was actually responding, wasn't he, to riots that were going on. He was saying rather than rioting, try to find work and improve yourself. Yes, I mean, in about sort of 10 words, he said everything that needed saying, really. He located himself in the story because of his father's history. And he explained how his father in difficult times did not take the difficult times as an excuse for violence and revolt, but as a spur to doing well.

29:43The Brixton riots were very unpleasant, violent riots, but they also were taken by a lot of the sort of chattering classes to be the natural result of Thatcherism, that people were so persecuted that they were bound to take to the streets and smash windows. And Tebbit was giving a completely different account of that and standing up against that in the most sort of compact and concise way with personal authenticity. He was critical to the fight against the unions, critical to the early stages of privatisation, and after the 1983 election, one might have thought he had a very bright future, possibly even Prime Minister.

30:24Then there was the Brighton bomb. This has been an exceptional rescue by the firemen, by the ambulance teams, and by the doctors who've been here at the Grand Hotel. Mr Tebbett looks in a bad state, but he is alive and he's now going off to hospital. Earlier I spoke to Philip Johnston, who remembers covering the bomb because he happened to be in Brighton at that conference when he was a very young journalist for the Newcastle Journal. Well, it was very early in the morning, funnily enough, and it was the last day of a very hectic conference season. Conservatives were always the final conference.

30:59And so it was about three o 'clock in, just before three on the Friday morning. And I'm afraid to say I was still up. It was one of those occasions where we were out rather carousing, really, and I was standing on the doorstep of the Metropole Hotel, which was next door to the Grand when the bomb went off. It did seem at the time like it was a car bomb because there was lots of dust and debris outside the Grand. And I ran towards it and then thought better of it and went back and actually went to file a story. I mean, there were plenty of people around to help those who were lying around in the street.

31:35and I went to file. I was working for a regional newspaper group at the time. I think we were one of only three newspapers to have the story on the front page the next day, largely because I was still up. And I spent the rest of the morning sitting on a wall opposite the ground, looking at the debris that just scattered into the road and onto the beach, while a procession of politicians, activists, cabinet ministers came wandering out of the ground and then into the metropole, which was then evacuated when the police realised that that might have a bomb as well, of course, to go off a bit later.

32:07I can remember sitting with Sir Keith Joseph in his silk dressing gown on one side and Grey Gowry in his silk dressing gown on the other side of me on the wall. Then at about six o 'clock in the morning, I think, it became apparent that the attempts were being made to rescue a few people from the front of the hotel. And I went back to my own hotel, which was quite close by, and turned the television on. And that very moment was when they brought Norman Tebbitt out on a stretcher. Right. From, you know, between the floors that had collapsed, looking absolutely appalling, as you can imagine. And his whole life changed at that point, even though he himself was not debilitatingly injured, his wife was.

32:52Yes, Margaret. Excuse me, Margaret was, yes. And he had to spend the rest of her life until she died a few years ago looking after her. Nobody knew at the time that this bomb had been put there six weeks earlier. By the IRA? By the IRA, of course. I think Simon Heffer made the point in his piece in the paper this morning that when Norman Tebbett went shooting subsequently, as he fired at the pheasants, he would say, that's one for Adams and that's one for McGuinness. He obviously never forgot. I don't think he ever forgave, and why should he? Lord Moore, after the bomb, Norman Tebbett's wife, Margaret, was left severely disabled, and he also had injuries too.

33:31What effect did it have upon him personally and upon his career? The first thing I think which was sort of underplayed because he wanted it underplayed was that he was in considerable personal pain and suffering in that sense, ill for quite a long time and weakened, physically weakened. Ultimately, that was less important in the whole story, including less important to him, than what had happened to his wife Margaret, the other Margaret, as you sometimes know. She was paralysed for life and lived for 35 years onwards and therefore required constant care. And he had the enormous burden of her care.

34:10And by the way, the expense, because this was by no means, wasn't paid for by the state. I think in a way that when someone you love suffers because of something in which you're involved, a sense of guilt and also a sense of thwarted ambition, because he did want to go right to the top. and he sort of knew or he half knew that this was now very unlikely because of what had happened with the bomb. So he hadn't got the ambition quite right out of his system, but he knew he had to help his Margaret and I think this was a very painful thing in every way. He dealt with it very admirably, but not without internal struggle and exhaustion.

34:50Margaret died in 2020. Norman had one last significant job in government or in the Tory party, which was chairman of the party from 1985 to 1987. Now, what's interesting about that, if I'm right, is that the arch-Thatcherite came into some conflict with the prime minister. Yes. In the 1987 election, which actually the Tories won extremely easily, Mrs Thatcher was very, very nervous. It was her third general election as leader, and she was always nervous about elections. The polls almost always showed the Tories ahead, but she didn't really believe them. And she wasn't very happy with Norman Tebbit.

35:26She conceived the idea, and of course the chairman is supposed to run the election, she would conceive the idea that he perhaps had ambitions of his own against her. And I think this wasn't 100 % untrue, though I think it wasn't really likely to happen. But there was a sort of, you can see how Tebbit might be thinking about this a bit. and she thought he wasn't running it properly and central office wasn't being run properly. And also in the way that she used to do if she was panicked about something, which wasn't very often but did happen, she would sort of blame who was to hand and Norman was to hand.

36:02And though she greatly admired him and he was a true Thatcherite, I don't think they were personally all that close always. And I don't think he was one of those charming flatterers who she rather liked. These rather sort of smoother characters like Cecil Parkinson, in fact, who had been an earlier chairman. And she had a tremendous stand-up row with Tebbitt in the middle of the 87 election when she thought it was all being mishandled. A poll came through which was unsatisfactory and she was suffering from an abscess on her teeth and the whole thing was, for a very short time, very bad. Tebbitt was angry about it and he felt that he was being misrepresented by people in her court, as it were.

36:37And fundamentally, it was trivial, actually. It didn't prevent the Conservatives getting an overall majority of 100 and it didn't fundamentally break the link between Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbett, but it was a sign of tension, I think, which were real and were to do with both their personalities. Did victory not lead to a reconciliation? It did after a bit. Norman Tebbett then retired from, not from politics, but from, he refused government posts. And then when Mrs Thatcher was threatened with the leadership ballot of November 1990, she asked Tebbitt to come back and offered him the post of education secretary which he refused for the same reason as he refused other things which was his Margaret and her condition but what he did do and he did very well but it was too late was campaign for Mrs Thatcher in that ballot but unfortunately the whole thing her campaign was poorly run and she was in Paris and the key day when people voted and probably the seeds of revolt had been sown earlier so it wasn't successful.

37:39But Tebbet was the most prominent individual conservative actively campaigning for her in that election. And he did it with his usual vigour. Listening to what we've discussed, difficult economy, terror attacks, prime ministers who look outwardly as if they're in control, but privately they're falling apart. It's striking how familiar so much of this stuff is. But also so many of the issues are the same. And one wonders in conclusion, what do you think Lord Tebbet, well, you might have known what Lord Tebbet thought of where the Conservative Party is today? Well, he was always on the right of the party, and he was always Eurosceptic.

38:15I think he actually articulated very well things that have been more crudely represented by reform. And it was part of the skill of the Tory party in those days that they could contain those views and more left-wing views without having a horrible dust-up. But Tebbit was not hard right, I wouldn't say, but he was tough and clear, and he hated ambiguity and sort of messing around. And he brought that edge to Toryism, which it needs, and partly in class terms as well. But in his day, this was never a way of splitting the party. But that knack has been lost now. I never talked to Norman Tebbitt about what he thought about reform.

38:55And indeed, he was by the time all this came along. He was very old and not at all well, but he did maintain a sharp mind. But he wasn't aiming for what's happened. He wasn't aiming for a Tory collapse or a new party to arise. He was aiming for a party strengthened by Brexit, in which he always believed, and which is an opportunity which unfortunately was not taken in the right way at the right time. Lord Moore, thank you very much. I would like to close on some comments from readers of The Telegraph. Robert Sparson says of Norman Tebbett, he inspired millions to get on your bike and look for work during the economic dark days.

39:31The single-minded attitude, although tough, galvanised resilience and ambition in others. A former BA pilot who, along with Mrs T, helped navigate a safe flight path for the UK. The turnaround led to the boom times. His passing unfortunately highlights intergenerational differences that sadly mean this country is less able to cope with difficult periods of change. RIP. And Katha Schmidt says, I once met Norman Tebbit not long after his return to work following the Brighton bombing. I told him I was proud to meet him. He shook my hand and modestly thanked me. My opinion of him never changed, because unlike many of today's politicians, he did not change his stance on issues just in order to become more popular.

40:15A truly genuine man. And everyone at The Telegraph says, Thank you, Norman, and goodbye.

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