Question: Has the Conservative Party ever recovered from the way Margaret Thatcher was deposed?

Lord Tebbit: No it hasn't. The act of pulling down the most successful post-war British prime minister and one of the most successful Conservative leaders we've ever had did enormous damage and we have never recovered from that.

Hopefully we are going to do so in the next couple of years but it is an unnecessary long-standing wound that has never healed.

Tebbit on the leadership race

Question: Do you think the way the current leadership contest is being conducted is delaying the recovery of the party?

Lord Tebbit: I think it is a very great pity that it will be six months after the general election before we have a new leader in office. At the moment, whatever his other qualities, inevitably Michael Howard is looked on by everybody as a lame duck leader.

That means that during a critical time the official opposition has not been conducting its duties in holding the government to account.

Question: Where do you stand on whether the ordinary members of the party should have the same say on choosing a leader as they do under current rules?

Lord Tebbit: It is complicated. Back when I was chairman of the party I did not have powers over the individual Conservative associations.

I couldn't sack a local association chairman, I couldn't sack a Conservative candidate, I could not control who the local association selected as their candidate.

If it was somebody myself, the prime minister and the chief whip thought was grossly unsuitable we could say that they couldn't stand as an official Conservative candidate but we had no powers to stop them being run as a candidate for the association.

At the same time it was the Conservative MPs - the 1922 Committee - who elected the leader of the party. That was a proper balance of powers.

The reforms introduced by Archie Norman and William Hague, in one of the few silly things that William has ever done, changed that balance.

It brought control over the associations to the chairman of the party, it gave him powers over the candidates and created a national Conservative Party that had never before existed.

As a sop the national membership was given the right to elect the leader of the party. I think both those things were wrong.

I think it's best that the MPs elect their leader and the associations have their sovereignty. I don't think you can get away with the MPs having the power to elect the leader without giving the associations their sovereignty back.

Question: In your view who would be the best person to lead the party?

Lord Tebbit: A clone of myself. In the meantime I look at all the candidates and see some very good ones and some less good ones.

I think that both major parties are suffering from a lack of MPs who are truly independent and who are not just there to seek a career in politics.

I think that in contrast to 30, 40 years ago we don't have enough people who are in the Commons to represent their constituents, hold the government to account with no personal ambition to become the parliamentary under secretary in charge of drains or the chairman of the select committee on drains.

The whips couldn't push around the old Labour trades union leaders who were in the house. They couldn't push around the likes of Airey Neave or Colin 'Mad Mitch' Mitchell and all the characters of the 1960s and 1970s. That's part of the problem.

Question: So there is less of a pool of independent minded people to draw on for leadership material?

Lord Tebbit: Not just leadership material but people who provide the ballast that keeps a party on an even keel, and that's true of both parties.

There are too many MPs that have come up as party apparatchiks from school onwards, bag carriers for ministers, special advisers all the time thinking of it as a career structure as opposed to a public duty.

Tebbit on electoral tactics

Question: Do you feel the Conservative Party has adopted too much of a politically correct, socially liberal stance?

Lord Tebbit: Lots of things have changed in society and some people think it's good and some people think it's bad.

What concerns me more at the moment is that lots of people in the Conservative Party think this government is popular, that New Labour is popular and that it's offering people what they want and therefore the Conservative Party has to offer something similar and compete for those votes. If you look at it that's not true.

When Margaret Thatcher was re-elected in 1987 she polled 100,000 votes more than when she was first elected in 1979. At this last election Tony Blair polled received 400,000 votes less than in 1997. So after eight years of him less people support him, while after eight years of Mrs Thatcher more people supported her - that seems to me to have a message.

Blair polled fewer votes than Major did in 1997, so this is an unpopular government. The problem is that the Conservative Party has made itself even less popular than the government.

This government is very unpopular so therefore it seems to me to be extremely stupid to make a pitch to the electors by getting closer to a party that is unpopular.

We should be asking: "What about all those people who didn't vote Labour and what do they want?"

That's as a party tactician, but my own view is that you don't go out and say, "what people want we'll give it to them" - you do that if you're selling shoes.

If you're a politician you should be saying, "this is what I believe is right for the country" and persuading people of your case. That's how Clement Atlee was elected in 1945.

Question: That sounds similar to David Davis's analysis, is that your feeling?

Lord Tebbit: Yes I think that's right. I think that politicians that need focus groups to tell them what their policies should be ought to be in another business.

Tebbit on the 'cricket test'

Question: Michael Howard has been talking about promoting a coherent British identity over divisive multiculturalism. Do you think that in the wake of the London bombings that opinion vindicates the 'cricket test' comments you made regarding the loyalty of immigrants?

Lord Tebbit: I've been opposing the concept of a multicultural society for 10 years or more and that's because a multicultural society is an impossibility.

A society is defined by its culture. It is not defined by its race, it is not a matter of skin colour or ethnicity, it is a matter of culture.

If you have two cultures in one society then you have two societies. If you have two societies in the same place then you are going to have problems, like the kind we saw on July 7, sooner or later.

If you look at places where they have that like Israel/Palestine, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, you will see that every one of those places is a sad and unhappy place.

I recently looked back at an article I wrote in 2003 which said that unless government policy changed we ran the risk of cities like London sinking into the same abyss that Londonderry and Belfast sank into, providing violence and terrorism, which is what we have seen.

Question: If your 'cricket test' comments had been taken more seriously at the time, do you think there would have been less likelihood of creating an environment that produced British-born suicide bombers of the kind that attacked London on July 7?

Lord Tebbit: I do think had my comments been acted on those attacks would have been less likely.

What I was saying about the so-called cricket test is that it was a test of whether a community has integrated.

If a community was looking back at where it had come from instead of looking forward with the people to whom they had come to then there is going to be a problem sooner or later.

Now I don't think that problem is all one-sided. Just imagine if you are a young, British born, Muslim man in one of our inner cities like Bradford.

Your school, where you are most likely to rub shoulders with ethnic English people, is failing.

They are scarcely teaching spoken English to the English, they are not teaching anything of the history of this country, they are not telling youngsters why we have established democracies right across the world, they are not telling them of the literature and the art and the music that has been created in this country.

So that young Muslim man has learnt nothing of the good side of this country.

What he knows is that on satellite television there are pornographic channels that are grossly offensive to the morals he's been raised with, if he goes out on a Saturday night on the town he sees drunken yobs urinating and vomiting in the streets, he knows white girls are easy from his school because they are having children at 13 and 14.

What is there for him to want to integrate with?

So we have got offer him something that is worth integrating with and in return he's got to understand that the Muslim religion is so unreformed since it was created that nowhere in the Muslim world has there been any real advance in science, or art or literature, or technology in the last 500 years ago.

Half a millennium ago Islam and Christendom were level pegging but now we've leapt ahead in all material terms, but the Muslim world would say we have fallen down in all spiritual and moral terms.

We have to accept our share of the blame and they have to accept theirs.