Lady Margaret Tebbit, survivor of Brighton bombing, dies aged 86

Lord Tebbit is mourning the death of his wife Margaret, 36 years after she was left paralysed by the IRA's bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton. 

Lady Tebbit passed away at the couple's Suffolk home in the early hours of Saturday following years suffering from Lewy Body Dementia, which left the 86-year-old needing 24-hour nursing care. 

The couple, who had been married for 64 years, were badly injured when a bomb ripped through the Victorian seafront hotel in Brighton during the 1984 Conservative Party conference, killing five people and injuring 31. 

A photograph of Lord Tebbit, then the Trade Secretary, being stretchered from the wreckage in his pyjamas became one of the enduring images of the attack.  

After the explosion, Lady Tebbit, then 50, spent two years undergoing treatment at Stoke Mandeville Hospital and the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital. Although she recovered some use of her hands and arms, she remained wheelchair-bound for the rest of her life. 

Lord Tebbit later said he could "never forgive" the IRA for such a "cowardly act". 

The former Conservative Party chairman, who served as a minister in Margaret Thatcher's Government from 1979 to 1987, said the death of his wife was not Covid-related. 

"She'd been ill for a very long time with wretched Lewy Body Dementia," the life peer told The Telegraph. "She was much loved and will be much missed." 

He thanked all the nurses and carers who helped to look after Lady Tebbit over the years.

Lewy Body Dementia is a type of progressive dementia that leads to decline in thinking, reasoning and independent function because of abnormal microscopic deposits that damage brain function over time. 

The family plans to hold her funeral at St Edmundsbury Cathedral in Bury St Edmunds, near the Tebbits' 17th-century home in Churchgate, later next month. Pandemic rules permitting, they will hold a celebration of her life on May 24, which would have been her 87th birthday. 

Writing about his wife's condition in The Telegraph in November, Lord Tebbit said: "Now we have stumbled back into yet another lockdown, leaving her even more isolated from our family and our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who will have even less opportunity to see her or, for that matter, me either." 

The couple, who married in 1956, have two sons and a daughter, five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Lady Tebbit was working as a nurse in Westminster when they first met and went on to practice at St Bartholomew's Hospital in West Smithfield, London.     

Lord Tebbit, nicknamed the "Chingford skinhead" after his north-east London constituency and tough reputation, effectively gave up the chance to be Prime Minister in order to look after his wife.

He later admitted: "Without having something to do, I would have become introspective, and thought too much about my own injuries. And more particularly my wife's injuries, as it gradually became clear that she was not going to make much recovery. I had to think through how we would manage, which was quite complicated." 

In 1995, Lady Tebbit, who became vice president of the spinal cord injury charity Aspire, appeared as a castaway on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs when she compared her earlier experiences of severe postnatal depression with her later physical disability. 

"I don't blame people," she said: "I don't completely forget or forgive, but one has to completely look forward." 

She revealed that the Queen had come to visit her in hospital and had said: "Come on Margaret, get angrier, you should be angrier", adding: "I felt it quite hard to be angry because I was just hanging on to life at that point – and you can always see people in a spinal injuries unit that were so much worse off than you." 

• Margaret Elizabeth Tebbit, May 24, 1934-December 19, 2020