Norman Tebbit, in the bathroom, with a meat cleaver

By Paul Richards

Visitors to Norman Tebbit’s flat in the 1980s might have assumed that the blood-drenched body parts, dripping all over his bathroom, belonged to some hapless political rival who had dared to cross the Chingford Skinhead.

But Tebbit’s new book which I am reviewing for Progress, a guide to cooking game (no, really), makes it clear:

“When I was a minister in Margaret’s Thatcher’s Government, ministers were from time to time offered a haunch from the deer culled in the Royal Parks, an offer I could not bring myself to refuse even though the only place to hang it in our London home was the bathroom.”

I’ve worked for two Labour Cabinet ministers, and have known dozens of ministers over the years. Yet none has ever told me about free venison. So two questions arise: one, is this another example of a ministerial perk which is kept secret from the taxpayers? Or two, do the Royal Parks authorities only supply haunches of venison to Tory ministers, on the assumption that oikish Labour folk wouldn’t know what to do with it? I would ‘deerly’ love to know the answers. Deerly – geddit?

Either way, it’s a scandal.