The right-wing Conservative MP Teresa Gorman was often described as feisty. The word did not do justice to her independent spirit, outspokenness, or her relentless self-seeking. As a backbencher, she achieved fame for her persistent opposition to the Maastricht Treaty in 1994 and consequent loss of the whip. She also made headlines for her promotion of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and, even in her eighties, attributed to it her good looks, energy and an active sex life.
Gorman was always a reliable source of good copy for the tabloid press with her quotable indiscretions. She was a sketchwriter’s delight, once being likened to Benzedrine, “poppers and caffeine, all rolled into one explosive little ball”. When planning to speak in Parliament, she deliberately wore bright clothes — particularly fuschia pink and saffron yellows — to catch the Speaker’s eye. To thank a whip who had (mistakenly) allocated her a handsome new office, she sang You’re the Tops to him down the telephone.
She was, however, more than just a character in the Palace of Varieties. Self-made, a successful entrepreneur, and the author of several, often polemical, books, Gorman lacked a political background. She admitted to “thriving” on stress, and, in an interview in 2000, described her life as “a series of situations where my mother [a waitress in a London tea-room] would have said, ‘Now you’ve gone too far, my girl. You’ll come a cropper’. That’s the kind of admonition I got for being an innovative, bright young thing. But just when I think ‘this is it’, somehow or other the sun comes out.”
Teresa Ellen Moore was born in Putney in 1931. Her father, an Irish builder, set up his own demolition company. She was educated at Fulham County School and then, having married at the age of 20, gained a teaching diploma at Brighton College of Education. While working in schools, she studied for an external degree at University College London, graduat- ing with a double first, in Zoology and Botany.
Her career path changed after a visit to the United States. The enterprise culture in America inspired her and, with her husband, Jim Gorman, a former Royal Marine who also went into education, she set up a successful business exporting teaching and nursing aids to developing countries. Her hostility to the European Community as it was in the early Seventies — was triggered by the introduction of value-added tax in 1973. She complained that the tax was hurting small businesses like hers, and the next year she founded and chaired the Alliance of Small Firms and Self-Employed People.
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Although she was interested in politics, Gorman kept clear of Edward Heath’s Conservative party, which she regarded as being too close to big business and too pro-European. She joined the party only when Margaret Thatcher became leader in February 1975 . Then began a long and apparently fruitless quest for a Parliamentary seat. In 1982, she was elected as a councillor for Westminster and, shortly before the 1987 general election campaign began, a vacancy arose in Billericay, a safe Conservative seat with one of the most right-wing Tory associations in the country. The sitting MP, Harvey Proctor, had resigned at short notice after his arrest for reported acts of gross indecency with “rent boys”. To the dismay of Central Office, the local party selected another colourful and controversial candidate; Gorman and the Billericay party were made for each other. There was an element of deceit in her success. She had correctly calculated that a 56-year-old woman — even one who looked as youthful as she did — had no chance, so she took ten years off her age.
In politics, she was an unashamed right-winger, preaching the merits of the free market and privatisation — and praising Wimbledon ticket touts as “enterprising brokers and risk takers”. She abhorred the European Community for its meddling, statism, and fraud. Gorman was strong on law and order, suggesting that rapists be castrated (“off with their goollies”). She was also a feminist: in 1992 she supported an amendment to the Representation of the People Act demanding that each constituency select two MPs, one male, one female. It failed.
When John Major formed his first cabinet in 1990, Gorman was furious that it contained no women. She considered herself to be the equal of many ministers and this resentment at her lack of preferment coloured her relations with Major and the whips. It was no surprise that she backed John Redwood in 1995 when he unsuccessfully challenged Major for the party leadership. She soon fell out with Redwood and, surprisingly, voted for the pro-European Ken Clarke in the leadership election of 1997 and dismissed William Hague, who won the contest, as a “prepubescent political marshmallow”.
She gained notoriety as one of the “whipless eight” from whom the Conservative whip was withdrawn in November 1994 after defying the leadership in a vote on the European Economic Community Finance Bill. Major’s government only had a slim majority and the rebels acted as though they were willing to bring his government down. She was unrepentant, pointing out that she was in good company because both Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan had also had the whip withdrawn during their careers. With some of the dissidents, she toured the broadcasting studios, castigating her own government. Revelling in the publicity, Gorman wrote The Bastards, a book describing her trials at the hands of the whips. Major had used the term when caught off guard to describe not her but several Eurosceptic colleagues in the Cabinet. Yet he still admitted he wanted to strangle her. When the whip was restored, she continued to rebel. She was a nightmare for the leadership.
The Conservatives suffered an overwhelming defeat in the 1997 general election, thanks in no small part to the activities of Gorman and her fellow-dissidents. Billericay voters did not approve and she suffered a big swing against her, more because of her self-indulgent behaviour than her views.
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She was often at odds with her colleague, Edwina Currie, another right- wing populist, saying, “If it (Curry) is too hot or too strong, it gives you a pain in the arse”, and declared herself the enemy of “the old, wet Tories who think they were born to rule”.
Her heroes were Thatcher and Enoch Powell — both of whom delighted in speaking their minds before like-minded audiences and tilting at the Westminster political establishment. Gorman, however was more a precursor of Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader. She was often tipped as the Tory MP most likely to defect, and in later years — most recently in the General Elections last May — she voted for Farage’s party.
Intelligent, well-read, a good communicator, energetic and original, she could, arguably, have been taken more seriously, but she was dismissed by the largely male Parliamentary world as a “women’s issues” MP who had become unhinged in her opposition to the EU. Then there was her advocacy for HRT, calling it the greatest medical advance of the century and referring to herself as “Saint Teresa of the menopause”. Having set up the Amarant Trust to develop HRT clinics and provide advice, she also had a financial interest in the business. She also called for an in-out referendum on the EU, campaigned for the establishment of new businesses to compete with the Post Office and British Rail, and put forward a Bill for the creation of an English Parliament.
Her last years as an MP were mired in controversy. In 1996, she was threatened with bankruptcy, which would have meant standing down as an MP, for allegedly failing to pay her own solicitors a £60,000 bill run up during a planning dispute with Thurrock Council. She and her husband had made 33 alterations to their constituency home, a listed farmhouse, without permission; they were fined £3,000 and had a new porch knocked down.
Four years later, she was suspended from the Commons for a month for not declaring an interest in properties she owned. The Standards and Privileges Committee censured her for having sponsored a private member’s bill to repeal rent acts without disclosing that she rented out three houses in south London and two in Portugal. Her defence was that she did not charge rent on the Portuguese properties, and that her Parliamentary pair, George Galloway, often stayed in one of her apartments rent-free. She claimed that the south London properties had become her husband’s assets after a marital rift.
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The suspension was the longest meted out by the standards committee in the five years it had existed; it claimed that Gorman had given “misleading” evidence. She objected, saying she had been “muddled” but never “dishonest.”
Unabashed by the row, she sought nomination as the Conservative candidate for the London mayoral election in 2000. The committee drawing up the shortlist unanimously rejected her. In 2001, she stepped down as an MP to care for her husband, who developed cancer. She remained, however, in the public eye, appearing as a guest on Have I Got News For You.
Her husband died in 2007. There were no children. Still vigorous, she placed an advertisement in Private Eye, which read: “Old trout seeks old goat. No golfers. Must have own balls.” It received 128 replies. On her birthday in 2010, she married Peter Clarke, a widower who was 16 years her junior. “I’d have gone bonkers living on my own,” she admitted, describing her new husband as “very good at looking after things . . . it’s like having a butler”.
Teresa Gorman, Conservative MP, was born on September 20, 1931. She died on August 28, 2015, aged 83