It was announced that Lady Tebbit passed away at the couple’s Suffolk home in the early hours of Saturday following years suffering from Lewy body dementia, which left her in need of 24-hour nursing care. Announcing her death, the life peer, 89, said: “She’d been ill for a very long time with wretched Lewy body dementia.
“She was much loved and will be much missed.”
The Tebbits were both badly injured when a bomb ripped through the Victorian seafront hotel in Brighton during the 1984 Conservative Party conference, killing five and injuring 34.
A photograph of the then trade secretary being stretchered from the wreckage in his pyjamas became one of the enduring images of the attack.
Lady Tebbit, then 50, spent two years undergoing treatment at Stoke Mandeville Hospital and the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital. Although she recovered some use of her hands and arms, she needed a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
Lord Tebbit later said he could “never forgive” the IRA for such a “cowardly act”.
The former Conservative Party chairman, who served as a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government from 1979 to 1987, stressed the death of his wife had not been Covid-related.
He thanked all the nurses and carers who had looked after her.
The family plans to hold her funeral at St Edmundsbury Cathedral in Bury St Edmunds, near the Tebbits’ 17th-century home. They also hope to hold a celebration of Lady Tebbit’s life on what would have been her 87th birthday on May 24.
The couple, who had been married for 64 years, have two sons and a daughter, five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
