Lady Tebbit, campaigner and former nurse badly injured in the 1984 Brighton bombing – obituary

Lady Tebbit, who has died aged 86, suffered severe spinal injuries when the IRA bombed the Grand Hotel at Brighton during the 1984 Conservative conference, also seriously injuring her husband, the Trade and Industry Secretary Norman Tebbit.

Though paralysed below the neck Margaret Tebbit fought back, with the support of her husband, to lead a reasonably full life within the constraints of her need for 24-hour care. She campaigned for greater mobility for the disabled, and for a national training scheme for carers.

After the 1987 election Norman Tebbit left Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet to spend more time with his wife and earn enough for her care (she was awarded nearly £500,000 in compensation, but her nursing costs alone were £50,000 a year).

She resisted his becoming her chief carer, not wanting the roles of husband and nurse to be blurred, but though he knew he was sacrificing his career he was adamant. For a good part of the rest of their life together, he would wake twice a night to turn her to prevent her getting bedsores.

At 2.54am on October 12 1984, the last day of the conference, the Tebbits were in Room 228 on the sixth floor of the Grand when a bomb planted weeks before exploded above them. They plunged three storeys through choking dust and crashing masonry, landing amid the debris.

Working by lights from a television crew – the hotel’s power supply had failed – firemen extricated first Margaret Tebbit and then her husband, and they were taken to the Royal Sussex County Hospital.

It soon became clear that, while Norman Tebbit had suffered serious injuries to his chest and thigh and had broken a rib, his wife faced paralysis. When Mrs Thatcher – the bombers’ target – visited her in intensive care, Margaret Tebbit told her she had no feeling below the neck; as a former nurse, she knew what that meant.

In hospital, she saw people with similar injuries give up and die. She would later say: “What choice did I have? Die or cope.” She regained some feeling in her limbs, and after a fortnight was taken by helicopter to Stoke Mandeville Hospital.

Her husband stayed first at Chequers, then at RAF Halton, to be near her while recovering himself and getting back up to speed as a minister; he returned to the Commons after three months.

Her consultant, Dr John Silver, reckoned his best patients were the “bloody-minded ones”, and urged her to be just that. Giving a rare interview in 1992 to Terry Wogan, she said: “I have had the right people behind me, cursing me, swearing, encouraging me and bullying me. I clean my own teeth with an electric toothbrush and I can pick up a glass. When you have been paralysed from the neck down, you just have to hope you are going to achieve these things.”

She patiently worked on her recovery, despite having – as she told Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs in 1995 – a history of depression, eventually well managed by medication.

After the birth of her third child in 1965, she had become so ill that she was taken to hospital, and into the 1970s she suffered panic attacks when her husband was fighting an election. “It is a chemical reaction to things,” she said. “I could feel if I was ‘going off the rails’. ” In a way, that experience helped her to cope with the effects of the bomb.

The Tebbits’ marriage, joyful and rated one of the closest in politics, transcended their injuries. In Stoke Mandeville Margaret Tebbit had visits from the Duke of Edinburgh, whom she told that she could now feel injections, and the Queen.

She began to learn how to control a wheelchair and use a computer. In March 1985 she was moved to a rehabilitation unit at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, Oxford, then to the Radcliffe Infirmary.

That June she made her first public appearance since the bombing, carried into the Royal Box at Wimbledon, and soon after was transferred to the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital at Stanmore.

Margaret Tebbit hoped to appear at the Conservatives’ 1985 Blackpool conference, but her doctors advised against it. Two months later, though, she attended the Lord Mayor’s banquet at the Guildhall, receiving a standing ovation. Princess Diana and her infant sons laid on a tea party for the Tebbits at Kensington Palace; Prince William, then three, stroked Margaret’s hand.

In 1986 the Duke of Westminster offered them a home in Belgravia at a peppercorn rent, as their flat was no longer suitable. Margaret Tebbit attended a Buckingham Palace garden party, saying later: “The chaps on the ward were so excited.” Discharged from Stanmore that August, she did make a return to that year’s party conference, switched to Bournemouth while the Grand was rebuilt.

In January 1987 she joined her husband in his Chingford constituency for the first time since the bombing. He was re-elected that June, but left the Cabinet saying: “I am not in a position to take over from the nurses, but she is looking forward to getting out and about more, and I would like to be able to enjoy a bit more of a family life.”

Loth to let him go, Mrs Thatcher in 1990 invited him back as Education Secretary; he declined. Margaret Tebbit was looking outward again, telling a conference on gardening and the disabled: “I am tired of people in wheelchairs being considered different. We are normal people like anybody else.”

After the 1989 Kegworth air crash, she returned to Stoke Mandeville to visit injured survivors. She took up the issue of wheelchair access to theatres, and in 1992 made a radio appeal for the charity Adapt. That year, her husband left the Commons with a life peerage.     

Frustrated at her difficulty in finding or keeping good carers – few lasted a year – in 1995 she launched an appeal for Aspire (the Association for Spinal Injury Research and Rehabilitation) to promote their training. In 1998, when Aspire opened its training centre at Stanmore, Margaret Tebbit, as its vice-president, showed the Duke of York round.

She made the most of what mobility she regained, using a lightweight wheelchair indoors and a heavier one outside. She could “just about hold a cup of tea, with help, but couldn’t possibly make one”; pain in her arms severely limited her reading, which had been voracious. She needed round-the-clock help with dressing and all the essentials. Visits to friends required one carer; going away for the weekend two.

In 1994 the Tebbits were reunited with Fred Bishop, the fireman who had pulled them from the rubble. Thirteen years later, the BBC rashly invited Norman Tebbit to meet the bomber, Patrick Magee; he told them: “The only reunion I’d be happy to attend is the one where Magee is reunited with a bomb.”

Norman Tebbit never moderated his contempt for the terrorists who had badly injured him, left his wife disabled and killed five other leading Tories. His wife was more measured, saying she could not forgive them unless they repented, and they had not.

She was born Margaret Elizabeth Daines at Ely on May 24 1934, one of nine children of Stan Daines, a tenant farmer on the Fens, and his wife Elsie. She went to school in the town of March, leaving at 16 to work in London before training as a nurse.

While at St Bartholomew’s Hospital she met Norman Tebbit, then an airline pilot, at a party; after a whirlwind courtship they married in 1956. She gave up nursing, but until shortly before the bombing worked as a volunteer at Barts flower shop.

After Norman’s election to the Commons in 1970, they bought their London flat and for many years had a cottage at Ilsington on Dartmoor. They eventually left London, first for a village near Horsham, then a specially adapted house in Bury St Edmunds. Her final years were clouded by dementia with Lewy bodies.

Margaret Tebbit never enjoyed the limelight, but was highly regarded by other political wives for the support she gave her husband, her intelligence and sense of style. She advised the wives of young candidates to travel with their husbands whenever they could.

She is survived by her husband, their two sons and a daughter.

Lady Tebbit, born May 24 1934, died December 19 2020