Teresa Gorman
Colourful MP who lost the Tory whip over Europe and celebrated the rejuvenating effects of HRT
TERESA GORMAN, who has died aged 83, was an irrepressible selfmade businesswoman, campaigner for hormone replacement therapy, and one of the nine Conservative MPs expelled from the party at the end of 1994 for repeatedly rebelling against John Major’s policies on Europe.
Although the “Whipless Nine” were readmitted, their rebellion paved the way for John Redwood’s challenge for the leadership the following summer after Major issued his “put up or shut up” call to the party’s Eurosceptics.
The only woman among the Nine, Teresa Gorman would have been a match for the whips even without the invigorating effects of HRT. Declaring herself the “St Teresa of the menopause” she insisted: “If men’s testicles packed up at 60 you can bet your boots there’d be a treatment available”. At 81, ten years after leaving the Commons, she volunteered that the therapy was still keeping her “very sexually active”.
Mrs Gorman brought to the Commons a belief in “the right of everyone to go to hell in their own way”. Enoch Powell was her hero, and she reckoned herself a close ally of Norman Tebbit. She bore with pride the accolade of “most Right-wing member of Parliament” bestowed by the Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee.
Stridently feminist, she personified her belief that women were “active, productive and seductive members of society”. She pressed for tax relief for working mothers’ child care costs, and her speech in April 1990 opposing David Alton’s bill to curb abortions – advocating a woman’s right to control her own body – was rated by some a parliamentary classic.
She knocked 10 years off her age when interviewed for her seat, claimed John Major tried to ”seduce” her into supporting the Maastricht Treaty – “it made my spine tingle but did not change my mind” – supported Tony Benn when he proposed that each constituency should have one MP of each sex, and declared that most women wanted judges to “cut off rapists’ goolies.”
To some she was a less subtle version of Edwina Currie, and within months they were enemies. Mrs Currie’s claim that most British egg production was infected with salmonella nearly put four major egg producers in Mrs Gorman’s Billericay constituency out of business. In Chickengate (1990) she accused Mrs Currie of falling for Left-wing scaremongering, declaring: “A good dose of germs every day builds up your natural immunity”.
Mrs Currie got her own back in her 1997 parliamentary “bonkbuster”
A Woman’s Place, writing of a time in the near future: “Teresa Gorman had at last succumbed to advancing years, stopped taking the tablets and shrunk to a benign little granny.”
In 1996 Teresa Gorman’s solicitors threatened her with bankruptcy – which would have meant the loss of her seat – for alleged non-payment of a £60,000 bill run up during a planning dispute with Thurrock Council. The Gormans – who also had a house near the Commons – had made 33 alterations to their constituency home, a listed Tudor farmhouse, without permission. After being fined £3,000 they gave in and had a new porch demolished.
Teresa Ellen Moore was born at Putney on September 30 1931. Her father was “a sort of Steptoe character”, a building labourer who became a demolition contractor. At the age of two, Teresa caught diphtheria, in later life claiming her mother had kept her alive with fizzy lemonade.
She left grammar school at 16 at her parents’ insistence to start work, then trained to teach at Brighton College of Education (qualifying in 1951), and took a double First in Biology and Zoology at University College London. She taught in London schools for ten years, her close contact with earthworms leading her in Parliament to demand their protection against nitrate fertilisers.
In 1952 she married Jim Gorman, a major in the Royal Marines who became a teacher and later her business partner. Though head of her school’s science department, she could see she would never be a headmistress because she might have children. In 1965-66 she taught in New York at the Convent of the Sacred Heart school, despite not being a Catholic; one of her charges was a Kennedy.
Infused with the American spirit of enterprise, she returned to start her own company, Banta Ltd, supplying biological and nursing teaching aids to developing countries. By the 1980s its turnover exceeded £30 million.
Teresa Gorman was politicised by the introduction of VAT in 1973, organising a demonstration when she heard that a businessman had committed suicide after being hounded by the VAT man. Next year she founded the Alliance of Small Firms and Self-Employed People.
In the October 1974 election she contested Streatham as an anti-Heath Independent, polling 210 votes. In 1977 she wrote: “Our association reserves its judgment on the Conservative Party until we see concrete proposals on how they intend to roll back the State and let us get on with our jobs.”
After Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, Teresa Gorman warned that increasing VAT to 15 per cent would benefit the black economy. When Edward Heath attacked Mrs Thatcher for following Milton Friedman’s monetarist policies, she retorted that sadly these policies had not actually been followed.
Nevertheless she joined the Conservatives, being elected to Westminster council in 1982 and the Conservative Women’s National Committee the following year. She campaigned in The Telegraph for Sunday trading – “a woman’s issue” – and proposed dukedoms for ministers abolishing their departments and knighthoods for councillors who outsourced. In 1986 she set up the Amarant Trust, to develop a chain of HRT clinics; three years later she published The Amarant Book of HRT.
Teresa Gorman was selected for Billericay, the ninth seat she tried for, just before the 1987 election. She replaced Harvey Proctor, who had just admitted to four charges of gross indecency, a baffled constituency chairwoman remarking: “He was never like that with me.”
Elected with a majority of 17,986, she first attracted notice at Westminster through the striking colours of her wardrobe. She promoted a bill to abolish the Post Office’s letter monopoly to help bring its “unruly labour force” into line; was one of four Tories to vote against the introduction of the uniform business rate, and launched a group to challenge the refusal of the “silly old sausages in Central Office” to organise in Ulster.
Teresa Gorman first made the tabloids during Wimbledon fortnight, 1988, when she championed ticket touts as “enterprising brokers and risk takers”. She went on to tell dustmen that they should tip householders at Christmas and not the other way round. The ultimate Thatcher loyalist, she threatened to resign the whip if Michael Heseltine’s leadership challenge of November 1990 succeeded. She was not much happier when John Major took over, claiming feminists were “hopping mad” that there was not a single woman in his Cabinet.
She was a leading critic during Major’s negotiation of the Maastricht Treaty, and the year-long battle over ratification – describing the pressures the whips put her under, including (she claimed) sexual harassment and unflattering innuendos, in The Bastards (1993). But it was only when hard-core Eurosceptics endangered the Government’s majority by voting against the EC Finance Bill on November 28 1994 that the leadership’s patience ran out.
The whip was withdrawn from Teresa Gorman, Nick Budgen, Michael Carttiss, Christopher Gill, Tony Marlow, Richard Shepherd, Teddy Taylor and John Wilkinson, with Sir Richard Body resigning it in sympathy. All were threatened with deselection, but with Major’s majority slim the threats soon gave way to an olive branch. The Nine were, however, the core of John Redwood’s 1995 leadership campaign, which did rather better than Major’s camp would admit.
When Major adopted a policy of non-cooperation with the EU over its refusal to accept British beef during the BSE scare, Teresa Gorman was delighted. “I don’t know whether the Prime Minister is on Ecstacy or had oysters for lunch,” she declared, “but he was terrific.” But she kept up her pressure by pressing for a vote on an in-or-out referendum on EU membership, having to deny that she was defecting to Ukip.
At the 1997 election she narrowly survived the Conservatives’ rout, hanging on with a majority of 1,356. When Major resigned as leader she urged the party to put off choosing his successor and concentrate on winning back its supporters.
When New Labour tabled its legislation for Scottish and Welsh devolution, she promoted – unsuccessfully – a Bill to set up an English Parliament. She tried to stand in the first election for Mayor of London, but was unanimously blocked by the party’s selection panel.
In February 2000 she was suspended from the House for a month for failing to disclose in the Register of Members’ Interests three rented-out properties in south London and two in Portugal, over periods of seven to 12 years, and having introduced a bill years before to repeal the Rent Acts without declaring an interest. She left the Commons at the 2001 election.
Teresa Gorman is survived by her husband. She did not have children, saying that her mother had too many too young.
Teresa Gorman, born September 30 1931, died August 28 2015