Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive

for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The program was originally broadcast

in 1992, and the presenter was Sue Lolley.

My cast away this week is a politician. Born in Pondersend, North London, he was brought

up in a working-class family, which by his own admission he found narrow and dull. He eventually

flew the nest, becoming an airline pilot, and subsequently in 1970 the MP for Epping.

A close colleague of Margaret Thatches, he pushed through union reform, and so enjoyed attacking

socialism that he became known in some parliamentary circles as the Chingford Skinhead. In 1984

he was seriously injured, and his wife was paralyzed by the IRA bomb at his party's

Brighton conference. He nevertheless went on to engineer the Tory victory of 87.

Now appear he is one of his party's severest critics, warning it in his characteristically

a serbic manner of the dangers of the Maastricht Treaty. He is Norman Tebit. Lord Tebit

patiently, as John Major has discovered to his cost, you've lost none of your appetite

for the fight. Do you miss the House of Commons?

In some ways, yes, it was a large part of my life, 20 odd years, and I had my good days

there, and some of my bad days as well. But I'm very glad in the evenings, when I'm at

home or out with my wife, as we do get out rather more now, that I'm not stuck there

on a running three-line whip or something of that kind.

It's also not quite the same place, is it all your old adversaries have gone, really?

Well, not all of them, by any means, after all, there's still folk like Dennis Skinner

there, Eager and Keane to have a fight about almost anything that's going, but you're quite

right, a number of them now have gone.

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