Norman Tebbit, the acid-tongued hard man of Margaret Thatcher’s government, gained lasting notoriety on the strength of an expression that he never used: “On yer bike.”
To political opponents, the comment – a paraphrase of his exhortation to the unemployed to go out and look for work – encapsulated what they saw as the callous indifference of the Conservatives to the rising joblessness of the 1980s.
