July 9, 2025 - 7:00am

To newspaper editors, Norman Tebbit, who has died at the age of 94, will always remain the symbol of atavistic, lower-middle-class Thatcherism. To them, he was full of mal mots about the unemployed, immigrants, and Tory modernizers, exhorting them to get onto bicycles to cheer for England at Test matches, or something of the sort.

For many millennial conservatives, however, Lord Tebbit will be remembered as the first genuinely online politician. In the heyday of Telegraph blogs in the early 2000s, he would reply, with a surprising amount of patience, to anonymous commentators with unprintable usernames reacting to his pieces. Some of them are now MPs — or even peers — themselves, and they owe part of their political education to the crucible of the comments section.

But to the wider public, Tebbit will be remembered mainly for two things: his extraordinary devotion to his wife — who was paralyzed by a cowardly terrorist attack he refused to forgive — and the eponymous Tebbit Test. In 1990, he said: “A large proportion of Britain’s Asian population fail to pass the cricket test. Which side do they cheer for? It’s an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from or where you are?”

Tebbit struck a nerve. Soon, it became customary to mention the Tebbit Test in the same breath as Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, prefaced with a word such as “infamous”, as a perfect example of British society’s backward views on race.

But a third of a century on, it is hard to see what all the fuss was about. To pass the Tebbit Test, one does not have to be of a certain ethnicity or ancestral descent. All one has to do is demonstrate integration into the body politic by electing to cheer for the national side. It is an impeccably civic nationalist litmus test, and not a particularly onerous one.

One suspects that it would not have been nearly as controversial had it come from a more progressive and respectable quarter. For instance, Nasser Hussain, the England cricket captain, who in 2001 expressed bewilderment after a match against Pakistan that “those born here, or who came here at a very young age like me, cannot support or follow England […] It was like an away game because so many people supported their side.”

The controversy over the Tebbit Test seems positively quaint compared with some of the ways in which race and belonging are talked about today. Earlier this year, entire news cycles were consumed by the question of whether Rishi Sunak, an Old Wykehamist born in Southampton who lives in a manor house in Yorkshire and who had the honour of being the King’s first minister, could claim the label of Englishness. He, like Hussain, would have passed the Tebbit Test but failed at the other, more demanding one that is gaining currency once again.

A better criticism of the Tebbit Test is that sporting allegiances are trivial when it comes to questions of integration. On this logic, it should not matter whether an immigrant competes for Britain or another country in sporting fixtures. Yet it is commonplace to fete the successes of British athletes from immigrant backgrounds, such as Mo Farah, as success stories of integration.

Sporting allegiances, like many other habits of daily life, now carry more weight than they should — a reality familiar to anyone from, say, Northern Ireland. On this, as on the power of online political discourse, Lord Tebbit was ahead of his time.


Yuan Yi Zhu is an academic and writer.

yuanyi_z