I just somehow ended up reading a wiki entry on Norman Tebbit. Tebbit was a close ally of Thatcher and served as her Secretary of State for Employment, Trade and Industry and as party chairman. - fyi - His wife became permanently wheelchair-bound after the Provisional IRA bombing of the 1984 Conservative party conference in Brighton. On 30 January 2006 he accused the Conservative Party of abandoning the party's true supporters on the Right, and opposed the new Leader David Cameron's attempts "to reposition the party on the 'Left of the middle ground'. Ive heard some of these before but liked them grouped together.

Quotes:

Said to Tom Litterick, a Labour MP, during a Commons debate in the late 70s (he died of another heart attack soon after this):

Go away and have another heart attack

On the BBC:

A typical piece of BBC anti-Tory propaganda.

(From an article heavily critical of the BBC and of what Tebbit regarded as the corporation's left-wing bias. Tebbit was referring to an episode of Doctor Who entitled Pyramids of Mars which he had recently seen - he perceived a "wasteland version of 1980" featured in the episode to be a symbolic, allegorical and propagandistic attack on the Thatcher government. Tebbit was apparently completely unaware that the episode in question was actually filmed in 1975, four years before Thatcher had even come to power). (He wasnt wrong though. It was just the BBC being ahead of its time.)

and

The word 'conservative' is used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the nineteen-sixties.

On John Major

He has the mulishness of a weak man with stupidity

About Tony Blair

I don't think he's a liar, just a fantasist. He says whatever he likes, and then he believes it.

On Islam and the West

The Muslim religion is so unreformed since it was created that nowhere in the Muslim world has there been any real advance in science, or art or literature, or technology in the last 500 years...we've leapt ahead in all material terms, but the Muslim world would say we have fallen down in all spiritual and moral terms. We have to accept our share of the blame and they have to accept theirs.

On changing the rules of the House of Lords

My Lords, would it not be a good idea if the Chairman of Committees and all Members resisted the mad idea of this House being dragged into this century? It is a very disagreeable century. Would it not be a better idea to drag us back perhaps into the 19th century, which in many ways was a very much better one for this country?

On claims that he is a racist:

I haven't got a racist bone in my little finger

On Muslim women wearing the veil:

If they wish to cover their faces and isolate themselves from the rest of the community and so thoroughly reject our culture then I cannot imagine why they want to be here at all. Perhaps they should just push off back to their own countries.