'It's with me all the time': Norman Tebbit remembers the IRA Brighton bombing

Before I opened a copy of his autobiography on a train leaving Liverpool recently, I tell Lord Tebbit, I took the precaution of removing the dust jacket. I think I'd have been safer reading Mein Kampf, which might have been interpreted as academic research.

"You never know," says Tebbit, unflustered by this implicit association with the Führer. "Years ago, in a buffet car, I encountered a large group of drunken Millwall supporters. They initiated a debate on rail privatisation. At Euston, they escorted me to a cab, singing a song they'd composed: 'In Praise of Norm'. People were fleeing from us. It was one of the most surreal experiences of my life."

This would be the legacy of his portrayal, on Spitting Image, as a psychopathic skinhead. "Yes. The puppet made me one of them."

Tebbit, 84, is speaking in the study at his house in Bury St Edmunds. It swiftly emerges that our views are diametrically opposed on almost every subject but this doesn't trouble him. In private he exhibits unexpected traits such as humour, consideration and even traces of the shyness he exhibited as a boy. You can see how he formed friendships with opponents like Roy Hattersley and James Callaghan. "Jim and I would drink together, one on one," he says, "when he was prime minister."

He remains devoted to his wife Margaret, who has been paralysed since the 1984 IRA bombing of Brighton's Grand Hotel, in which he was also severely injured.

"I can't escape that memory because I see my wife every day. So it's with me all the time. I suffer physical pain too. Old age makes old injuries worse. But you can't let that dominate your life."

I was in Manchester on the day of the bombing, I tell him, in an Irish pub where the atmosphere resembled that of a Brazilian carnival.

"People were so furious that Thatcher [Tebbit never wastes breath on her first name] succeeded that they sympathised with loathsome people like the IRA."

You still catch occasional glimpses of the character Michael Foot called "the most studiously offensive man in the Commons". Tony Blair, Tebbit tells me, is "the most corrupt bastard we've had as prime minister since the 18th century. Utterly corrupt. Awful creature. But," he adds, with a last subtle flourish of the blade, "very plausible." He'd have voted for same-sex marriage, he says, "if it had been restricted to – no, imposed upon – Cherie Blair and Hillary Clinton."

He's no admirer of John Prescott, "a man who had sexual intercourse with a member of staff in his office".

"Didn't Cecil Parkinson ..." "Cecil had an affair with his secretary. But he wasn't at it in his office, which was funded by the taxpayer." Parkinson, he emphasises, was fornicating on his own time.

If we could have another widely hated leader, Tebbit adds, "who could deliver 14 million votes – bring them on".

That, I suggest, is not David Cameron. I wonder what Norman Tebbit, from a working-class north London background, made of Cameron's curious recent exchange with a BBC journalist concerning what was presented as the handicap of being posh.

"My difficulty with these people – not only Cameron – is that they lack hinterland. Alec Douglas-Home couldn't have been posher. But he had hinterland. Jim Callaghan had hinterland."

"Meaning?"

"He'd worked. He'd served in the war. I grew up in the war. I have been bombed by a better class of person than the IRA."

"You might have been prime minister."

"Indeed."

"An opportunity you would have relished?"

"Yes. I don't know how well I'd have done. When Thatcher was brought down some people urged me to run. But I'd given my word to my wife."

A hard decision?

"Very."

In the general election Tebbit thinks "the Tories will lead in votes cast, and the Lib-Dems will hold more seats than many expect. I don't think Ukip will make much impression in terms of elected members, and that, as regards seats, it will be nip and tuck between Conservative and Labour.

Some have suggested a cross-party coalition to protect the union.

It's possible, he suggests, that there could emerge a "new gang of four" or more Labour members "who'd work with Cameron on an agreed platform. Because if we end up with Miliband and Sturgeon, voters know who'll be wearing the trousers."

I haven't seen much of Tebbit on the campaign trail.

"I think there has been a fatwa issued against me."

"Seriously?"

"I suspect so."

In recent years he has applied his talents in new areas: as a chef (he's published a game-bird cookbook) and author (Ben's Story, his children's novel, was published last year). Both projects were well received. There is one discipline, though, that Lord Tebbit is never likely to master: the gentle art of discretion.